Frauds in the Wings: The Plagiarized Fantasy Behind New Right Politics

Curtis Yarvin and other far right thought leaders are smuggling their political candidates into power--but all their ideas are recycled fantasy fiction.

I’ve been hearing the name “Curtis Yarvin” a lot in recent weeks, mainly due to his connections to Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance.

In researching Vance’s ideological underpinnings the media is only just now discovering this Yarvin guy and his bizarre political philosophy. But I’d actually first come across Yarvin some years ago—not for any connection he had to the Trump movement, but the connection he had with the proactive male supremacist movement, the “seduction community,” and Andrew Tate.

Yarvin was the guy who coined the political use of the term “red pill.” It is of course a reference to the film series The Matrix, in which characters trapped in a computer simulation take a pill to break out and perceive the real world. For the various factions of the broader so-called “manosphere,” practitioners in various flavours of male supremacy, this movie was source material for a number of neat analogies. It meant women aren’t real, as men are. They are programmable entities understood and manipulated by becoming fluent in a type of code. Taking the red pill became key to seeing that men are permitted to believe they run the world but are in fact subjugated by the actual hidden masters.

Like the machines that allow us to believe we lord over them in The Matrix when they secretly enslave us, so too do women allow men to believe they too are not enslaved. It is up to men to take the red pill, see the truth, and restore their position in the true patriarchy. Some of them do this by wearing stupid hats and going to “Game” seminars.

When I wrote about this I explained how a hell of a lot of these people are closeted or ashamed geeks, overcorrecting for their un-alpha hobbies and interests while at the same time feeling that their underground geek and nerd abilities give them an edge. The escape from the incel trap is algorithmic, a solvable game.

All this is derived through Curtis Yarvin, who took this metaphor and changed some words to make it sound like his own idea after some years of just ripping off the movie. (He has also, at times, referred to the same concept as The Truman Show as if he needed to hammer home that his unoriginality isn’t even original).  Instead of the Matrix now it’s “the Cathedral,” filling the role in society once taken by religion. Education and the media are part of this structure that has enslaved you with lies, and you know they’re lies because, well, they’re saying all this crazy stuff about racial equality and the dignity of human beings you find personally abhorrent.

Yarvin swapped out the fantasy terminology but Andrew Tate won’t shut up about it. Tate’s entire political philosophy, to the extent that he can be said to have one, is just Yarvin before Yarvin filed the Wachowskis’ serial numbers off his own body of work. Tate isn’t smart enough to mask the plagiarism.

Curtis Yarvin is more intelligent than Andrew Tate. I need you to understand that is not a compliment. There are species of lichen that are more intelligent than Andrew Tate. Yarvin, I feel, falls into a category of people who you might think of as stupid people’s idea of a smart person. Like Jordan Peterson or, as a matter of fact, Charles Manson. These are people who are skilled in using a lot of words to say nothing much at all.

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I went to a Jordan Peterson seminar once, only because a friend of mine had a spare ticket, and after sitting through the entire thing I’ll be damned if I could remember a single thing he’d talked about the entire time except for fragments of modern continental philosophy (Camus featured heavily) that he’d had the gall to claim he came up with himself. When you do sit in on a lecture like that and you realise at the end that you hadn’t absorbed almost any of it, you do kind of feel stupid. You have an Emperor’s New Clothes moment. There’s a temptation to perceive it as incredibly insightful because you feel like it went over your head.

I asked my friend what he thought of it and he gave a response I thought was legitimately very smart and astute. He said that it was very entertaining performance art.

I now know that Jordan Peterson’s philosophy is mostly actual gibberish. But it’s very confidently spoken gibberish, and often that is enough. Often they grow the gibberish like coral on a lattice of someone else’s plagiarised ideas. Jordan Peterson, to his credit, has got some contemporary philosophy under his belt. I can respect that.

What I want to talk about today is how much of the right wing faux-intellectualism that is coming to power today is downstream from epic fantasy. These top minds of the political brass, these Wormtongues whispering into the ears of the new generation of populist conservatism, the Yarvins and the Tates and whoever else, are doing little more if anything than running word replacement over the Wachowskis and Tolkien and half a dozen other fantasy epics and hoping their marks are too dazzled by the performance to notice.

Check out this clip of an interview between Curtis Yarvin and Tucker Carlson.

For context, this clip is the end of a 20-minute opening lecture from Yarvin that I trimmed for Tucker’s reaction, but you can watch the whole episode here if you want. See, though, how Carlson reacts like he’s just watched a bear ride a unicycle around a pavilion while balancing a fishbowl on its nose. That was one of the greatest rides of his life. He doesn’t have a fucking clue what this guy just said to him. He couldn’t follow ten words of it, but holy shit wow! What a performance.

Curtis Yarvin is more intelligent than Tucker Carlson. Again, not a compliment.

It would be a mistake to say that Yarvin isn’t intelligent. It would also be a mistake to say that about Peterson. There are many types of intelligences that can coexist in a single mind. There are vast, amoral intelligences that exist in the brain of whatever kind of creature Yarvin is that appeal strongly to some very wealthy and very powerful sociopaths. Yarvin is by all accounts a very skilled computer engineer, and as for political theory? You know what they say about when all you have is a hammer.

What Yarvin has more than political intelligence is density. There is no concise reading of Yarvin. He’s written probably millions of words. I’m not remotely the expert you’d consult to summarise over two and a half decades worth of continuous writing and tell you what it’s all about and audit its consistency. But “you need to read all the work” is the impossible standard used to shut down critics of many prolific writers and tweeters and video essayists. Like Yarvin. Like Peterson.

What I can tell you is that a hell of a lot of it is built on a reef of Matrix and Lord of the Rings references.

…that the political project of the reactionary right—the New Right or whatever you’d like to call them, the right of the internet age and the tech oligarchs—is built on a foundation of entitled rich geeks misappropriating popular fantasy stories into what they think or hope are coherent structures for human society? Once you notice, you’ll see these guys think we’re already living in one of these worlds.

The funny thing about these guys is that they often want to be seen as the heroes of these stories while openly admiring the villains. Often they misunderstand or reinterpret who the heroes and villains actually are. Yarvin, for his part, reinterprets the “Matrix” or the Cathedral as liberal or progressive institutions. The “Deep State,” to use yet another term from Trump world. The red pilled rebels of Zion are the right wing heroes. And yet Yarvin, a deep misanthrope, seems to admire the machines more.

Curtis Yarvin, departing from the libertarian image conservatives usually want to paint for themselves, is an unapologetic totalitarian. His vision is for democracy to be dissolved and for mercantilist capitalism to be adopted as not just the economic but also the governing structure of society, under the rule of a CEO King whose authority is total. As a software engineer who sees society as little more than an algorithm to be manipulated, it makes sense that he would have been enthralled by the concepts explored in The Matrix—human beings kept docile by the algorithm of a supreme intelligence so perfect that even the resistance is part of its plan.

This guy will be on the ballot in 2028

The Matrix, released in 1999, is still a fairly young entry into the pantheon of legendary geek media. Undoubtedly one of the oldest gods in that pantheon is Tolkien, and Yarvin derives plenty from Tolkien as well. He has an entire parallel political theory that analogises human beings to the races of Middle Earth.

I won’t link to it directly only because Yarvin writes on Substack and Substack is social media now so linking to his page is the equivalent of tagging him on Twitter. I will generate as little encouragement for one of his notorious 4,000 word rebuttals as I can manage. His blog is easy enough to Google. To crudely summarise, the hobbits are conservatives and the elves are on the left, and everyone fuckin’ hates elves, that’s like high fantasy 101. But also, this is randomly a mixed metaphor about domestic violence for some reason. (As I said, there is no concise reading of Yarvin).

Moreover, when hobbits try to take revenge on elves at large, or even worse when they actually succeed, they are damaging a resource they do not even know they have. There may even be some elves—the dark elves—who are actually on the hobbits’ side.

Naturally, being traitors and all, these dark elves keep a low profile. But culturally, they are still totally elves and into, like, “art films” and stuff. Any attack on elves in general weakens and demoralizes this important fifth column. What are they useful for, these dark elves? See below.

And of course, if you try to impose hobbit culture and lose, you are just funny—like one of the stock bumpkins Shakespeare used to savagely mock peasants. Losing is never a good look, especially if you lose while trying to do something impertinent.

You can only lose the culture war. If you lose, you lose. If you win—you really lose.

Power in America is a marriage of elves and hobbits and always will be. We all know who the wife is. Hobbits: try thinking of your culture and society as a battered wife.

Your job, when you are a battered wife, is to get out of the situation. To escape, it is sufficient to know what your job isn’t. Most people who do not escape fail to escape because they are doing some other job, which is not their job. Here are three simple lemmas which may help you get out of these kinds of false, deceptively appealing jobs.

Winning a battle in the culture war—as in today’s Current Thing, the repeal of Roe v. Wade—is not like leaving your abusive husband. It is certainly not like finding a new husband. No—it is like hitting your husband back.

Notice that another class of protagonist has arisen here in the form of dark elves, presumably normatively liberal right-wing sympathisers like, I dunno, Matt Taibbi. Again, guys like Yarvin are drawn to the cool, dark, anti-hero, pseudo villain, or outright villain protagonist archetypes. The Matrix trenchcoats, the sunglasses, even the entire aesthetic of Elon Musk’s edgy Twitter rebranding.

They give themselves names like the “Dark Enlightenment,” or the “Intellectual Dark Web.” Red pill becomes black pill. They style themselves after the popular conceptions of Machiavelli and Nietzsche but rather than delve below a surface reading of either of these writers instead just talk about what Sauron did right, or the geopolitical theories of Archaon the Everchosen.

All right, so these are a bunch of terrible geeks doing RL worldbuilding. Here’s why we should care:

Over the past little while it’s started to dawn on me that Donald Trump is a red herring for those of us who fear a strong resurgence of the right wing in politics. The far right embraced Trump as a crass and passionate departure from the neoconservative GOP of Bush, but even now the new right are growing impatient of his age, his decreasing stamina, and his luddism.

The out-of-left-field selection of JD Vance as his 2024 running mate, which many people strongly suspect was foisted upon him as a devil’s bargain with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a consortium of other right wing techbruhs, goes a long way to confirming that Donald Trump is now little more than a Trojan horse for the fantasy political project of tech geek totalitarian misanthropes.

Credit to the brilliant Michael de Adder

Peter Thiel, the far right venture capitalist and former business partner of Elon Musk, has been involved in the rebranding of the GOP to the party of Trump since day one, but was never as visible an influence on Trump’s campaign as Steve Bannon, who was instrumental in getting the millennial reactionary geek vote supercharged in 2016 with the whole Gamergate thing. Bannon is now… well, he’s in prison, but Thiel and Musk have stepped up to the plate by getting Thiel’s protégé Vance on the ticket.

Thiel is, of course, an acolyte of Curtis Yarvin, as well as a huge fantasy geek. He names all of his companies after characters and concepts from the Lord of the Rings series. He is openly opposed to democracy and, like Yarvin, also draws comparisons between human beings and Tolkien’s races. But not in the same way that Yarvin does, because again, these philosophies are largely incoherent and not even internally consistent.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves. “And then there are sort of all these questions, you know: How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically — I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

“So why can’t we be elves?” I asked.

Thiel nodded reverently, his expression a blend of hope and chagrin.

“Why can’t we be elves?” he said.

Thiel believes in Yarvin’s Cathedral by way of the Matrix but he’s word-swapped it again to once more give the illusion he came up with it. Except he calls it “The Ministry of Truth,” a term he nicked from Orwell.

Elon Musk, of course, is notoriously obsessed with fantasy fiction and sees himself, one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet, hilariously, as part of the plucky resistance.

According to his biography he wooed Grimes with his immense knowledge of Lord of the Rings, and he also famously believes we live in a Matrix simulation. It’s probably easier for him to square his immense power with his underdog complex if he can convince himself that we literally all are part of this grand action adventure.

When it comes to the right’s terminally backward-facing views in yearning for a romantic past, of prosperous and fearful empires ruled by benevolent monarchs and for the fruitful and proud masses, it’s not unimportant to note that their best and favoured examples come from fiction. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy and head of a party that is the genealogical descendant of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista, is obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and throws fantasy festivals based around Tolkien and the Neverending Story series.

According to Meloni, “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in.”

I think I can probably figure out what most of the appeal is with high fantasy for the far right, and it’s cheap and it’s lazy. As already noted, it’s the monarchy thing.  It’s clear, autocratic, and absolute rule. It’s a structured class system with little fluidity. It’s national pride. It’s strong culture. And, let’s fuckin’ face it guys, it’s clearly distinguishable races, with different innate abilities and social roles and incompatible cultures. Yarvin, according to those who have met him in private, is reportedly comically racist. There’s a reason why Yarvin fans are also deeply interested in the racial pseudoscience of Steve Sailer, Richard Hanania, and the like.

JD Vance forgot that you’re supposed to unfollow your embarrassing Twitter follows before you’re picked as a VP candidate

It's also just a bad reading of the source material, though few have ever accused the far right of being particularly good at media literacy. J.R.R. Tolkien, though you would probably class him as a conservative, was not far right and certainly wasn’t an advocate of the feudal kingdoms he wrote about.

Ironically, right wing fans of geek culture are usually the most passionate opponents of any and all “message fiction” being smuggled into their media diet (that’s kind of what Gamergate and its associated scandals were about, after all) but when there’s one writer whose message they actually appreciate, it turns out to be the one who actually really did literally just want to write some silly stories about wizards and, in a foreword to the second edition of Lord of the Rings, wrote “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”

And as for the Matrix… well, I think we all know how the Wachowskis feel about the far right appropriation of their work.

In any case, it’s important that we remain alert to the actual origins of many of these philosophies entering the political arena. I certainly don’t mean in any way to diminish the brilliance and the powerful legacy of Tolkien, nor the creators of The Matrix or any other of the powerhouses of fantasy literature that are being misused in this way, but it must be understood that none of these works were ever intended as instruction manuals for good governance or social order, and we need to be savvy to maintain the health and literacy of our political discourse lest some tech billionaire one day smuggle a candidate into the White House with a political philosophy modelled on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

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