Tag: Curtis Yarvin

Witness to a Friendly Quarrel

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Back on Monday the 27th of February I found a link in my mailbox to Curtis Yarvin’s substack, the Gray Mirror, with his latest post.  It was a critique of Ron DeSantis’s efforts to replace the woke management of a small state college in Florida (called prosaically, New College of Florida) by replacing the board of trustees with conservatives.  DeSantis put Chris Rufo and some other conservatives on the board and told them to excise the cancer of wokeism.

Yarvin tells a parable about how a drunken man chops down the mighty oak that shades the town square in some mythical Lithuanian town and the townspeople decide to replant the rootless trunk.  But the wise man goes and scoops up acorns and plants them around the fallen tree’s stump.

Further on Yarvin explains that DeSantis and Rufo trying to reform Florida colleges is the town trying to replant a dead tree in the ground.

“The fallacy of replanting the tree is to believe that the past is something we can just have back. It isn’t. We can be inspired by the past. We can want a beautiful oak tree in our town square. But we live in the present and we have no oak tree, just raw lumber. We can build the future under the inspiration of the past—but it is not the past. And we have to be patient enough to wait for it, or we are just losers. Press F to pay regrets.”

But the wise man (according to Yarvin) is anyone who tries to build a new culture from the ground up by supporting coffeehouse artists in New York City that somehow aren’t woke.

“Do you want to win? Or do you want to wring your hands? Where did wokeness start? Among the cool kids. In the Village arts scene. To hear the story the world will be telling itself in 50 years, always listen to New York now. The future always starts at the center and at the top.”

So that’s one side.  Today I read a rebuttal by Rufo.  He calls Yarvin’s take “right-wing doomerism.”

“Yavin’s basic theme is that the progressive-managerial state, or Cathedral, is so powerful, that any action to challenge it will end up reinforcing its power. This is right-wing doomerism—if the beast is all-powerful, better to adopt the position of a prey animal and do nothing.

But I’m more optimistic than this. The takeover of New College has already changed the dynamics in higher education. We have a strong new president who has a mandate to change the administrative and academic trajectory of the institution. You’ll see changes in the next 120 days.

…

I believe in an uncompromising new conservatism that attempts to restore the authority of the people over their government—and lay waste to woke institutional capture. The Republic is not yet dead. We have a duty to do whatever we can to save it.

I’m ready to fight—and win.”

Okay, so there is definitely a lot of rah-rah stuff here.  Rufo is cheerleading the efforts his people are making in Florida and anticipating victories and gains that won’t happen for years, or maybe decades.

But, so what?  The progressives worked at this poison for over a hundred years.  They worked away diligently and steadily.  And the results have been astonishing.  Horrifying, yes, but astonishing.  So why should we expect that our results won’t be slow and incremental.  As TomD said back a week ago or so in a comment “One step at a time is how we collectively got here and hopefully how we will get out.”

Sure, in my more pessimistic moments I fear that Yarvin is right.  The Elites control everything and they have all the money.  We can’t possibly win.  But then I think, “Then what have we got to lose by trying to win?”  So, I’ll take Rufo’s side in this cordial quarrel.

He’s making his play.  Let him finish it before we start declaring him the loser.  I hear DeSantis plans to roll out the same idea at other Florida state colleges.  They’re talking about eliminating things like gender studies and DEI and even affirmative action.  For all I know DeSantis is the next Pericles and Florida is the Athens of the new world.  It’s certainly no stranger than the original Athens having happened.

How in the world do you get the Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides from a bunch of bronze age barbarians like the Dorians toppling Aegean civilization and celebrating it in epic poetry?  Truly, the Afghanis aren’t that far removed in culture and lifestyle from the 9th century Dorian invaders.  Predicting the Parthenon from them seems a bloody miracle.

Maybe we’ll get a miracle too.  Our enemies aren’t geniuses they’re just better organized and better funded.  There is such a thing as luck.  And luck rewards persistence and intelligence.  It’s like the old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.”  If you’re just willing to lay down and die then you’ve already decided your fate.  Luck isn’t going to pull you off the ground, put your sword back in your hand and strike down your enemy.  You’ve got to try.  So, let’s give DeSantis and Rufo the benefit of the doubt and all the help we can think of.  Let’s cheer them on and provide all the rah-rah we can muster.

If DeSantis can turn around the Florida state colleges it’ll make guys like Abbott in Texas envious and might start a movement to clean up all the Red-State state-colleges.  And after that maybe it’ll spread to the grammar and high schools.  See what I mean?  Rah-rah is easy.  And it’s cheap.  What’s a few electrons rattling around in my computer?

Anyway, I’ll bet on DeSantis and Rufo in this quarrel.  Right wing doomerism just isn’t my cup of tea.

05JAN2023 – Just a Regular Old Thursday.  The Calendar’s full of Them

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As the tragicomedy of Kevin McCarthy continues to unfold in the Emerald City of Oz, I was tasked with filling out and presenting my documents to Cthulhu’s minions inside the precincts of the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh.  Well maybe it was the Dunwich town hall.  But there was definitely a lot of eldritch horror somewhere close by I can assure you.

My hand was a virtual claw from having to sign my illegible signature hundreds of times to the various documents.  I was made aware of the 11 billion separate types of discrimination that Dunwich recognizes and prosecutes along with the blessings of diversity, equity and inclusion that seem to seep out of every document that I was forced to read.  It was inspiring.

It was a particularly dreary day weatherwise, drizzling and forty degrees, but I was kind of happy to foray out into the world just to convince myself it was actually still out there.  Apparently not having a Speaker of the House hasn’t managed to disrupt the space-time continuum.  And the zombies wandering around town looked neither more nor less mindless and homicidal than usual.  So, all’s right with the world.

Maybe I’m becoming acclimated to the present levels of dysfunction and unreality in the world around me.  I noticed it didn’t rankle me as much as it used to.  Of course, that could mean I’m becoming zombified myself.  But whatever the cause it eased the pain while moving around town.

I read a post by Curtis Yarvin on his Substack that referenced Heinlein’s story Waldo.  Now Yarvin is a neo-monarchist who is mostly interested in the political situation we find ourselves in.  But he’s also a technologist and here he hypothesizes that one of the more promising areas of technological progress could be in providing human/machine interfaces that allow humans to utilize their manual dexterity at different scales and remotely.  So, he sees a sort of virtual reality setup where a surgeon could utilize microscopic equipment as if he were the size of the miniaturized characters in “Fantastic Voyage.”  Or a gigantic machine hundreds of feet long could be controlled by a human with the point of view of a giant.  His premise is that human intelligence and dexterity after proper training is much more responsible and skilled than an AI.  After reading about some of the failures of self-driving cars he may be correct.  I never thought Robert Heinlein and Curtis Yarvin would intersect in this version of the multiverse.  But there it is.

Will Cain did an interview of Tucker Carlson.  What I found interesting was Carlson’s answer to what had red-pilled him.  He described his mindset as we went through the Iraq War (from 1:36 to 3:19 in the video) and I found myself remembering a very similar evolution.  I went from believing that we were there to make America safer to eventual disillusionment and a sense of absolute betrayal by the Republican establishment.  And Carlson echoed that.  I didn’t watch the whole thing yet because it’s too long but that little snippet stuck in my mind.  Millions of people in this country feel totally betrayed by the Republican party and will never forget that.  And that is the reality that gives me hope.  If people as different from each other as Tucker Carlson is from me can both come to essentially the same point of view about our political system then it must be the truth.  And if it is the truth then I’m finally working from correct assumptions.  And that is what I’ve been trying to achieve all these years.  It’s not that the truth guarantees that things will work out.  It’s that basing your actions on false assumptions guarantees failure.

As this was finishing up I se that McCarthy is still furiously negotiating to buy off his enemies with committee seats and promises of accountability.  Ah, what a circus.  We really should require all of Congress to wear the red nose, baggy pants and size 20 shoes.  And the Speaker should always arrive at the podium in a tiny car.  As I said in a comment on the last post, we must be terrible people to be sentenced to leaders this atrocious.  Robespierre and Caligula were paragons of sanity compared to the bozos we’ve got working for us today.

Well, that’s enough.

To Paraphrase Huey Lewis and the News, “It’s Hip to be Unwoke.”

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According to the New York Times there is a troubling trend among some avant-garde kids to assume the trappings of traditional institutions, like the Catholic crucifix, and defy the virtue signaling mantra of their generation’s elite guardians.  So, the Times is looking for a sleuth to ferret out the details of this heresy and hopefully expose the malefactors so that they can be properly punished and then allowed to recant and declare their love for Big Brother.

This New York Times project is described in an article in the City Journal that goes on to try and explain these young rebels as the first fruits of a rebellion of the young against the dominant culture which in this case is the current all encompassing orthodoxy of woke-ism.  In other words, these young people are organizing a counter-culture against what used to be described as the Left’s counter-culture against western civilization.

The author states: “Few things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).”

Apparently, these young rebels can be found in trendy areas of lower Manhattan and their cachet as members of the avant-garde worries the gatekeepers of public morality at the Times and the author equates this worry with genuine peril that the youth among the elites could be corrupted and driven over to the dark side where one day they would produce a new consensus to shift the balance of power away from the monolithic progressive world view.  And a new regime could populate the Deep State with acolytes of the Dissident Right.

Well, I don’t know about that.  I know that Curtis Yarvin is interested in the lower Manhattan scene being discussed and he is of the opinion that the only way to neutralize the Deep State is to peacefully displace it with a new elite.  But in both of these examples I wonder at the circumstances and the time line that would bring about such a transformation.  Some kids in Manhattan adopting Christian symbology isn’t a bad thing but what is the larger significance?  Do these young people hope to change the values that guide modern life?  Are they looking to traditional values to give meaning to their existence?  And how many people are we talking about?  A handful, a few thousand or a growing trend?

And what will be the reaction of the gatekeepers?  I’m sure they’re already busy looking to siphon off any discontented teens with a Tik-Tok influencer who sports a trans-friendly pseudo-Catholic rosary that involves anti-Pope Francis’ official rainbow seal of approval.

I guess, on balance, any fear on the part of the official organs of the state like the Times is a good and promising symptom.  Therefore, I won’t rain on their parade.  But I think I’ll wait to celebrate until I see some larger more widespread evidence that the Zoomers have begun to rebel.  Possibly the “Let’s go Brandon” cheers (or their actual words) at football games could be interpreted as the first real sign of popular unrest of the young against the Left.  But I’ve assumed that was more of a reaction to the COVID lockdowns by the Biden administration and not a general anti-woke reaction.  We’ll need to see clearer signs such as voting trends or support for traditional institutions like religion and marriage.

But I’ll end by saying that anything that hints at the young abandoning the woke cult is encouraging.  Even if it’s a minority movement, it’s a start.

Curtis Yarvin Gives an Example of Winning the Battle and Losing the War

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I was reading an article by that highly intellectual critic of the social order we live under, Curtis Yarvin.  If you are unfamiliar with his writing, Yarvin’s analysis of the oligarchic nature of the American power structure is in many ways observably correct.  And although his writing style and his elitist perspective are sometimes maddening, his ideas are very often illuminating.

In this case he was writing about Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter and bring it private.  The gist of the argument was that because, potentially, Musk could completely control Twitter’s policies and actions toward the public it was a rare chance for a pure strategic victory against the Left.

And to contrast it with a tactical victory that eventually led to a strategic defeat he relates the decades long struggle against crime in New York City.  The familiar story relates that under decades long liberal rule New York grew more and more crime-infested until by the late 1980s there were over 2,000 murders a year and the whole city was besieged by petty and serious crime.  People were leaving the city by the hundreds of thousands and public confidence had evaporated.  This set the stage for a law-and-order Republican, Rudy Giuliani, to win the mayor’s office on the strength of a promise to restore law and order through stringent policing methods.

And it worked.  For more than twenty years Giuliani and Bloomberg who came after him, were able to maintain New York City at low levels of crime.  Levels that hadn’t been seen previously even in less chaotic times.  New York became a livable big city and thrived financially and culturally.  But what had not changed was that the majority of New Yorkers were still progressives who deep down in their souls resented the fact that this criminal justice system ended up incarcerating mostly black criminals.  Since their logic told them that somehow this wasn’t fair, they were never happy with the system even if it saved them from a tidal wave of crime.

So, after they became complacent about crime and when the George Floyd moment came New Yorkers were glad to have the excuse to abandon effective policing.  And the rest was inevitable.  Now the city is more dangerous than ever and trying to get back to where they were a few years ago seems politically impossible.

Yarvin’s point was that the tactical victory by Rudy Giuliani allowed for the strategic defeat that came afterward.  In other words, allowing conservatives to do the dirty work for the progressives doesn’t alter the beliefs of the progressives.  It only enables it.  It never leads to permanent change.

And I saw the same thing in Massachusetts during the 1990’s.  The Democrats would crash the state fiscally with bleeding heart programs and corrupt practices and then the Republicans would have to clean it up.  But they would never get any credit for the changes.  And as soon as the ship was righted they would be replaced with another round of dysfunction.  At best the Republicans were a relief valve that kept the whole insane machine from exploding.

Well, this is an old story.  But Yarvin’s emphasis resonated with me.  Winning a battle and losing the war was not something that should be done.  What we can’t afford to do is patch up the Left’s system.  We need to let them utterly fail at what they do.  We need to exclude them from some endeavor as completely as is possible and then make that endeavor an undeniable success.  And then keep them out of it.

Where I see that already happening is at the state level.  Places like Florida and Texas and other states need to change their laws to make them uninviting for progressives fleeing from California and New York.  And they need to protect themselves as completely as possible from the federal government.  In that way they can build their own system and reap the benefits while excluding the Left.

Places like California and New York need to be completely abandoned by the Right.  They need to crash completely.  As I like to portray it, they need to reach the level where cannibalism is the dominant lifestyle of the inhabitants.  Things need to get so bad that eventually the Leftists simply die off completely.  And all that is left are normal human beings.

The point is victory is only victory when it weakens your enemy and strengthens you.

Curtis Yarvin Muses on the Lessons of Afghanistan, But Not the Way You Think

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Yarvin isn’t thinking about the strategy that brought us to Afghanistan and kept us there for twenty years.  He’s thinking of what it means to have a Deep State that would prefer to stay there forever because they want to endlessly expand their influence and scope to include the whole world.  Yarvin’s take on what could be done about this boils down to the American people providing the President and his party with a mandate to take a wrecking ball to the executive branch and reconstitute it at a much, much smaller scope.

And who disagrees with that on our side?  But how exactly do we get a majority of honest men in the Congress?  It seems impossible.  I think the only way it happens is if a President declares a state of emergency and using extralegal action fires the whole executive branch and uses the military to keep the government functioning while he rebuilt the government on a sane basis.

It’s nice to talk about draining the swamp but to do it would require an army and a general without fear.  Mr. Yarvin needs to provide the plan for how to do something that we all agree needs to be done.

Curtis Yarvin Talks About Regime Change and How it Can be Done

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I’m a non-paying reader of Curtis Yarvin’s substack page Gray Mirror.  His latest article was a response to a journalist named Damon Linker at the The Week becoming upset at the content of a discussion between Yarvin and Michael Anton in an American Mind podcast.  Apparently, the idea of these two men discussing the idea of a monarchical government for the United States is so beyond the pale that Mr. Linker started getting the vapors.  Meanwhile, roving mobs of masked thugs burning down police stations and private businesses is just good old democratic horse trading to him I suppose.

Yarvin uses Linker’s outrage as a jumping off point to go into his hypotheses about what will and won’t work at reforming American government.

I’ll paraphrase these:

  • The only choices with respect to the present regime are leave it alone or replace it completely.
  • To replace the present regime we will have to elect a president and allow him to assume absolute power.
  • The process of making this change can be completely non-violent.
  • That the actions embodied in these hypotheses are just as practical as any other reform program being contemplated.

I recommend reading Yarvin’s essay.  It is worth thinking about.  The present oligarchic regime is extremely powerful and has figured out all the angles for rigging our elections and even ignoring the leaders we do manage to get elected.  Yarvin may be right about the need for a total reset.  The part about it being violence free is the thing I have my doubts about.  Read it for yourself and tell me what you think.

The Trouble with Being a Pundit

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I follow Curtis Yarvin’s blog posts on his substack called graymirror@substack.com.  Yarvin is a neo-reactionary.  What that means is he believes democracy will be replaced by some kind of monarchy.  But the monarchy he imagines is more like a corporate state where the king is like a CEO.

Yarvin’s posts are enormously long and convoluted.  But he started his latest post with a short discussion of what he says are the three kinds of dissidents.

“There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great; real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each. But each has its problems.

The problem with (c) is that it’s too hard. It takes a lot of luck to get there and stay there. It’s quite inconsistent with doing anything else with your life—and this under conditions of very mild repression, historically speaking. And the more you succeed, the more dangerous your position becomes. I would recommend the outside way to only one kind of young person: le trustafarian. And it has to really be your calling.

The problem with (a) is that it’s too easy—nothing binds you to reality. The dissident anons create the best art, yet never without some slight sense of playing tennis without the net. Yet this complete, even excessive, artistic freedom is balanced by challenges in opsec that compare only to general aviation. If you are not meticulous enough to fly a Cessna, you are not meticulous enough to shitpost.

The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the opposite, a reflex to provoke.)”

I found this discussion of the problems with the various types of dissidents very helpful.  And it goes a long way to explaining why mainstream pundits are so careful.  There is so much fear of being canceled that they’d rather stand a hundred yards away from the edge of the Overton Window than risk being called a racist.  Surprisingly Tucker Carlson has been an exception.  He comes remarkably close to sounding like someone from the Dissident Right.

What this brings out is the fact that the pundits are aware of these lies.  They know the truth but are afraid to say it out loud.  Which is why as soon as the Overton Window shifts, as it did when Donald Trump spoke out against illegal immigration, these pundits will eventually move forward to somewhere slightly behind the edge.  And that is a cause for hope.  When a time comes when a man who is not afraid to speak the truth gets a platform that the Left can’t dynamite, we will see if the American people are ready to be led in a new direction.

Another interesting thing that Yarvin discusses is what it would take to beat the Deep State at its own game.  Being a monarchist Yarvin sees the solution as the appearance of a strongman.  He hedges a little about what that would look like.  But the names he mentions as historical examples are Cromwell, Caesar and Charlemagne.  Well, none of those names were peaceful characters who worked within the system and made small changes around the edges.  So, he’s talking revolution.  That’s bold talk.  But he says anything less will fail because the Left isn’t kidding around.  That’s something to think about.  His proof is what happened to Donald Trump.  Trump had popular support.  So, the Deep State worked around that support and used a combination of fraud and propaganda to retake the government.  It does show that it will take more than popular support to eliminate the Deep State.  It will take force.  To purge the intelligence agency will take force.  To purge the armed forces will take force.  Not violence but power politics.  You will have to buy off powerful people and then get rid of those powerful people next.  Machiavelli will be the rule book for an operation like this and plenty of people will end up in prison even if things go well.

So, do I think it will take a strongman?  Yeah, I guess I do.  Do I think it would require the end of the republic?  Currently I’m not sure.  I hope not, but I’m not sure.  If a leader arises to displace the Left, would he feel safe only leading for eight years?   Wouldn’t he fear revenge once he left office.  Is it too late for republicanism?  That’s the question.

Thoughts About the Conversation Between Michael Anton and Curtis Yarvin

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Recently I watched a discussion on the Jack Murphy Live show that featured Michael Anton and Curtis Yarvin.  If you are unfamiliar with either one of them, I’ll say a few words about them.

Michael Anton was a former senior national security official in the Trump administration but is best known for writing the “The Flight 93 Election” back in March 2016 under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus.  He received graduate education at Claremont Graduate University where he learned from faculty that followed in the tradition of noted academic Leo Strauss.  Anton is a social conservative and a pretty pessimistic critic of the current state of American politics.  With the failure of the 2020 election Anton does not believe the Republicans will ever win the presidency again.

Curtis Yarvin is a computer scientist who also has become known for his political beliefs which some have called “neo-reactionary.”  Yarvin believes that government should be almost like the management of a publicly owned corporation with the CEO taking the place of the “king” and the citizens as stockholders.  He also had a pseudonym under which he wrote his thoughts, Mencius Moldbug.  Yarvin is extremely unenthusiastic about democracy in general and doesn’t hold out much hope for the American form at this point in its evolution.

Anton and Yarvin are both very smart guys.  They’re both academics in a sense.  Both of them would be part of the elite if they happened to follow left-wing ideologies.  Because of what they do believe they are pariahs in our present political climate.  I think listening to them in the discussion both of them are extremely pessimistic about the United States escaping from the control of the progressive corporate, bureaucratic, academic complex.

So why listen to these guys talk?  Well, that’s a good question.  Neither of them has an action plan to reverse the damage and move things back to a normal country.  There isn’t a website where I can join the underground and fight for the day when we take back the country.  I think I read them so I can feel like I shouldn’t just give up.  As long as I know that there are other intelligent people who don’t accept the idea that there is no use resisting the woke state, I feel like I can figure out a way to hold onto the good things that used to be the basis of our way of life.

I can think of one line that Yarvin made pretty close to the end of the video.  When asked what he thought people should do he said no one should try to use force to stand up to the feds alone.  That would be suicide and it would accomplish the opposite of what you intended.  That would be sort of what happened on January 6th.  The government would destroy you and use it as a propaganda argument for destroying everyone else they didn’t like.  Instead, he said we need to say no! 

In other words, we have to figure out a way to reject their program.  We need to build up organizations, businesses, groups that don’t depend on their approval.  There’s nothing new about that message.  That’s the old “build your own platforms” line.  But what he is saying is that it’s the only way.  And we need everyone on our side, all 70 or 100 million of us to form a single organization to say no to what is going on.  And that’s the only encouragement I take from all this.  If two guys like Anton and Yarvin sort of agree about where we are and what we must do then basically the whole gamut of people who aren’t leftists agree.  We have to stop trying to do everything at once and take concrete steps one at a time.  First order of business, we pool our resources and identify one important thing we can get done and do it.  Maybe we decide that the most important possible thing is crushing Amazon.  And maybe we buy the votes of Democrat senators and congressmen to make it happen.  But we move heaven and earth and we get it done.  That alone would be an enormous shot in the arm for our country.  Suddenly a million small stores all over the country would find business that had been strangled out of existence by Jeff Bezos.

But whatever it is we decide to do; rein in the social media companies or re-establish freedom of religion or outlaw child transgender mutilation; we need to win a battle and win it decisively.  Donald Trump and Peter Thiel are renegade members of the elite.  They are the ones with the resources to organize new platforms.  Anton and Yarvin are members of the intellectual class who would disseminate the ideas and help implement the actions we want to see happen.  We are to some extent their customers.

We want to hear more and soon about any real plan to get something new started.  Anyone who has the ambition to lead a movement has a once in a lifetime opportunity right now.  We’re ready to be led.  There is a nation looking for a savior.  We could make this a great country again.  If that doesn’t happen soon then we need to leave.

Michael Anton and Curtis Yarvin Talk About America

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Michael Anton and Curtis Yarvin are sort of the polar opposites of the intellectual world that opposes the Woke establishment.  If you are interested in what the intellectuals think about our current mess these two men will sort of cover the territory and listening to them disagree about what it means and where it is going might clarify your own thinking.  But if you don’t like that sort of thing don’t touch it.  I think it’s about two hours long and I’ve only gotten through the first thirty minutes.

My sentiments are with Anton’s point of view.  But Yarvin’s cynicism and pessimism is something that I hesitate to ignore.  I read his substack and it by turns, angers, depresses and sometimes makes me think.  Yarvin is a renegade elitist.  But he is at least honest about it.  But so is Anton in the sense that he is an academic and a government apparatchik.  But Anton’s sympathies are with us.  Yarvin doesn’t really have any sympathies.  Mostly he is full of scorn.  I’m going to watch the whole thing and then I might write a post about it.