TITLE: A Yarvin-Sized Fork in the Road
SUBTITLE: Curtis Yarvin currently wields huge influence over the President of the United States and his revolutionary administration. The Blob can no longer afford to remain blissfully ignorant of his existence
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2025-02-07
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/a-yarvin-sized-fork-in-the-road
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/a-yarvin-sized-fork-in-the-road

A couple of weeks ago—at the time of writing this article—the New York Times did an interview with the reactionary philosopher Curtis Yarvin. The interview was conducted by David Marchese, an NYU-educated journalist who runs a podcast featuring figures from our cultural and political milieu. Ironically—given the content of this essay—I’ll admit that this was the first time I’d encountered Marchese. Given the ideological chasm between these two men both Yarvin or Marchese were able to maintain a friendly conversation and neither seemed to be operating in bad faith. But what struck me was that Marchese seemed to have zero idea what Yarvin actually believed. Rather than engaging with the old Muldbug’s most interesting beliefs like the cathedral the conversation continually focused on Yarvin's monarchism and edgelord takes. It honest to god felt like Marchese had never actually read any of Yarvin’s most influential essays and was instead totally relying on 2nd hand analysis.

This is not to say that Yarvin “won” the encounter; he presented, as usual, as a somewhat incoherent speaker who failed to push back against the inevitable criticisms someone from David’s pedigree would bring up.

But the question of how one of the most influential political philosophers of the 21st century was basically unknown to the NYT has been worming its way around the inside of my head ever since I finished the interview. Because he is influential and he has been in rightwing circles for quite some time now. It wasn’t like Yarvin was invisible; he was right there for anyone with an interest in looking. 

I for one have been trying to get my friends and family to believe in the existence of his influence for months but I’ve had as much luck as trying to convince them Santa is real. It has been vaguely Cassandraesque screaming at everyone I know that the incoming regime is serious and this man is their ideological father only to be given side eyed looks. Well for better or for worse I was right. The lady doth protest too much.

Of course it isn’t just the NYT who was ignorant this man even existed, a quick glance at google scholar shows how untapped the field of Yarvanese studies is.1

I can think of only one explanation for how the prestige cultural tastemakers and information aggregators of our society—academia, the media, etc. (which I refer to as “the blob”)—were so blind, and it is this:

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For at least the last 30 odd years, with increasing thoroughness the blob has filtered its workforce along moral lines. Since all forms of affirmative action - in this case racial, sexual, and ideological - mostly impact new hires in 2025 there are basically zero conservative young people inside of any of these organizations. Don’t get me wrong, there are libertarians and classical liberals, but the sort of person who would naturally discover and then find beauty in the works of someone like Curtis Yarvin is basically absent from the blob. The choice to pursue an aggressive policy of promoting hiring among racial minorities, women, and cultural progressives was not accidently. No, it was a conscious effort on the part of individuals to use the prestige institutions of our society to do good. And do not be mistaken from their perspective this strategy paid enormous dividends.

Of course, ejecting conservative people from the Blob did not result in them disappearing and has instead simply resulted in the construction of parallel communities outside of the liberal mainstream. As the Blob became more and more ideologically coherent it has become less and less tolerant of any deviation from the party line, let alone someone as heterodox as Yarvin. To the point that the only people left in Dodge are true believers and people with good camouflage.

But this coherency has come at a real cost to the cultural relevance of somewhere like the NYT among people who reject their coherent morality. This is especially pronounced among young heterosexual guys(~18% of America’s population) for reasons that should be obvious to everyone. In fact, we have reached the point that basically no young straight man consumes the prestige press directly, in my experience. To the extent more normie dudes consume the mainstream press it is almost always through a 3rd content creator on a platform like Xitter or Youtube - who obviously injects their own commentary.

As I see it this leaves the Blob with one of two possible choices. Either they can adapt to the new vibe shift and start trying to hire more straight guys - in particular straight white guys - and then allow them to pursue the topics they find compelling, much of which will be quite critical of the last 20 years of social change. Or second they can double down on their status as the mouthpiece of the ancien regime and wait for the inevitable return of Democrats into power.

What I can say with certainty is that the ignorance that they have been able to maintain about the political beliefs of modern conservatism is over. You can think that they are bad beliefs, you can think that people shouldn’t think them, you can wish that no one would associate with people who believe them, but right now in 2025 they are extraordinarily influential over the President of the US and his revolutionary administration.

1Perhaps if impoundment proves unworkable they can give some of the money to me to begin a sub discipline.
