Tech tycoon guru reveals the Accusation in a Mirror of conservative pandemic rhetoric.
Curtis Yarvin is reportedly a guru to tech tycoons and their acolytes like JD Vance, and he articulated that the aristocrat revolution should involve pandemic-type measures.
If you want to know more about Curtis Yarvin, there have been 2 recent podcasts: Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, and the Behind the Bastards podcast had a 2 part episode. I found one of Curtis Yarvin’s publications because Julia Black, who wrote about Curtis Garvin in The Information, references some of what’s in Curtis Yarvin’s monarchist piece, on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.
I would like to just present some excerpts from the piece, which I think there's a reveal here of the disingenuous lockdown revisionist rhetoric, saying the quiet part out loud, some covid for thee but not for me, and also Accusation in a Mirror.
Yet the entire transition must remain orderly. Is there a huge difference between life in the public and private sectors? One big company is going out of business—another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot. It is not the 20th century.
At most a week of Covid-style lockdown should be enough to secure the new regime—not only are the Americans of today, especially the blue-state ones, no Minutemen, but unlike most historical urban populations they do not even know how to be a mob. Today, civilian numbers are as irrelevant to contests of force as in the 13th century. 21st-century Americans are a civilized people. We do not chimp.
Let’s go through some critical steps in a real 21st-century regime change. Here is what a real “unitary executive” would do if he was a real “dictator on the first day.” Libs: if you are used to squeaking fearfully about far-right conservatives, this very reasonable and if anything mild program will make your prostate gland quiver.
And yet, nobody needs to get shot—or even thrown out on the street. While there are many things to say against a government running on a soft currency, the power to print money sure makes it easy to run a regime change. All the civil soldiers of the old regime—and there are a lot of them—can be severed very gently from their positions.
[...]
Of course, journalism is just one category of education. While education (and even religion) are long-term responsibilities of government, they are not immediate needs in the same way as, say, nutrition. The exception is their function as daycare—for which we can do what we did during Covid. If you are a caregiver who needs to stay home because schools are closed, you should get your current salary to homeschool—at least until the new schools are spun up.
[...]
Finally, once the new regime has universally demonstrated the incompetence of the old regime, both through historical re-education and by its own vastly superior performance, any remaining interest in reversing the transition will belong to antiquarian cranks. There are still people today who want to restore the Holy Roman Empire, or Covid masks, or something. Whatevs.
[...]
“No widespread or systematic execution” is a hell of a standard. Covid doesn’t put everyone on a ventilator, either. So everyone should get Covid?
Every accusation is, indeed, a confession apparently.
The idea that the right and conservatives are just against disruption, and that protecting people from covid was just too disruptive to be tolerated, is clearly simply pure bullshit. (Of course we already knew that.) They’re all for disrupting the status quo if it serves elite interests - a revolution to thwart any attempt at democratic government oversight of business or to protect public safety.
I seriously suggest that whenever there’s opposition to single payer health insurance in the U.S., and some conservative comes along railing about the jobs that will be lost in the private health insurance industry, even though it will likely mean people just move from one job to another because it’s not like there will be less patients… I suggest saving this quote of Curtis Yarvin: “One big company is going out of business—another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot.”
The weird part here is of course that the right-wing cohorts are actually suggesting “live streamed swatting raids” — according to Ivan Raiklin they’ll be carried out by deputized anti-vaxxers at the county level. I don’t know who needs to hear this but typically swatting raids involve guns, and surprise raids with guns usually at least sometimes involve people being shot and or dragged away. These operations rarely stay neatly confined when you’re dealing with, as Rwandan Jill D. Rutaremara described in a masters thesis: “the interests and fears of the masses, and why they responded to genocide ideology and elite incitement.” And, after all — “No widespread or systematic execution” is a hell of a standard.
They already for a long time have deployed astroturf activism to serve anti-regulation interests. They don’t want oversight by the people. But anti-government doesn’t mean anti-governance, because it appears that they want to install full corporate control by elite CEOs exercising power like a boss in the round the clock lives of all of us. They always say you’re free because you can quit your job any time. But can you quit a monopoly? Matt Stoller says no, that’s what makes monopolies an authoritarian governance — it’s totalitarianism.
These people are not willing to tolerate mitigation measures that might remind people of danger and might quell interest in shopping in person, and are against remote work because it threatens commercial real estate interests. But in an authoritarian regime change — they would totally bring it.
The “Dark Elf” Leading Tech’s Extreme Right w/ Julia Black - Tech Won’t Save Us - Oct 17
Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | Behind the Bastards - Sep 18
Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | Behind the Bastards - Sep 20
If you’re wondering where JD Vance got his idea that a little monarchy might be good for America — these people are on the same page. They possibly see themselves as aristocrats, like those from the 1700s, who viewed as a possible threat, so-called tyranny from below - equality and democracy is seen as that by aristocrats. I’ve mentioned before that the billionaire cryptocurrency proponent Balaji Srinivasan was supposed to be the Trump pick to run the FDA back in 2017, favoured by Peter Thiel, because of course he’s anti-regulation. So Elon Musk isn’t the only billionaire up for cabinet positions. This guy had also claimed back in late 2020 that broken trust in the pandemic that supposedly led to anti-mask sentiments could be solved with blockchain — you really can’t make this stuff up. Gil Duran reported in The New Republic that Srinivasan said “No Blues should be welcomed there” - meaning in San Francisco - referring to Democrats. And on the Tim Ferriss Show interview from 2022, Srinivasan got details about the Lance Armstrong doping timeline wrong, and admitted that he probably was getting things wrong (multiple times in the same interview). He references Andrew Huberman positively — that’s the scientist influencer from Stanford who has a podcast that promotes unregulated supplements that are unproven and dubious, and who was revealed as a serial liar in his personal life and who repeatedly recounted an apparently made up clinical study about sunscreen. And Srinivasan says we should view doping in a positive way, saying: "So in the same way, once we flip that moral premise and say optimalism good, enhancement good, then we start shifting it out of Game of Shadows and Soviets and the doping scandals and cheating, all those negative adjectives and we start going to the positive stuff of what Huberman is doing and what David Sinclair is doing. And so on and so forth. The reason I just want to identify this, I actually think that moral language, that moral premise, is everything and it’s often not articulated."
Performance drugs, pseudoscience, re-education, and a tycoon-run monarchy corporate government. What could possibly go wrong?
Apparently the revolution will be gaslit.
The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.
— Bob Black