Interview: Curtis Yarvin on Elon Musk’s Flawed Ideology

Curtis Yarvin is an influential political writer who challenges heterodox perspectives about modern government. You can find his work at Gray Mirror. This interview was edited for clarity and conciseness.

Does listening to an audiobook count as reading it?

Yes, if you’re absorbing a book, you’re absorbing a book.

Is the New York Times more powerful than Congress?

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he had a Republican majority in the House and in the Senate, and a Republican majority in the Supreme Court (which isn’t supposed to have an ideology, but everyone knows it’s there). What could he do with that power? Basically nothing.

Liberals facing the situation were terrified because their enemies had taken over the country. On paper, this seemed like absolute power. But conservatives couldn’t harness it. The power was nowhere to be found.

The Times is actually the last of the great 20th-century newspapers in which the owners play a role in the paper and in the course of legitimate American ideas and ideals. But, let’s say the Times was blown up. They have a staff meeting; everyone's in the building, Russia sneaks in a hypersonic missile over the North Pole. Totally destroyed. Does that change the way the United States is governed?

No, I don't think it has any real impact because you eliminate only one of many institutions of similar journalists. We have to think about power in terms of an iceberg, of which the Times is the tip.

I’m old enough that I saw the entire climate change movement develop during my life. What’s ironic about climate change is that parts of Alaska are affected, but 99 percent of Americans, Europeans, and Westerners would never notice if someone didn’t tell them it existed. Without media coverage, we wouldn’t know.

So, knowing involves a remarkable level of trust in the media and institutions like the New York Times. They report it, and then Congress makes it an issue.

Imagine Congress passing a law that mandates capitalizing the word black or African American or something similar. You realize that changing the English language is vastly beneath Congress's scope of power. Congress has no power — so Orwellian. But the Times does. You can't use the term homeless anymore. The euphemism has been replaced by unhoused.

This type of power doesn’t come from Congress, but from the power structure in which the New York Times reigns. Is the center of the structure, its brain, “the Cathedral,” academia, or journalism? It’s a complex relationship. 

But you certainly wouldn’t want to resect just one of these organs and leave the other intact. Maybe each half of the brain could regenerate the other? Be safe – scoop out the whole skull, wax and polish the bone. You have to treat leftism like a prion disease. Like kuru or mad cow. The autoclave is just the start. 

You’ve said that rightism is just the absence of leftism. How?

The word totalitarianism imposes several lies on history. Yes, both communists and Nazis threw people in camps surrounded by barbed wire, and both censored the press. But this does not align them both with the right or left.

In 1919, the Bolsheviks were all about free love. By 1949, abortion was a crime. Stalin had conservative ideas about family and marriage but funded American Bohemians in the 1930s. But these right-wing tropes evolved from radical leftism.

Some conservatives will point to the socialist in National Socialism and say it was leftism. That’s a historical and illiterate take, similar to classifying birds with bats. They both have wings, and they both fly. But their last common ancestor was 400 million years ago.

After the world war, Germans faced a false dichotomy politically and intellectually. They had to decide whether they were right or left. And if they were left, they had to embrace everything coming out of England. They tried the fourteen points. They tried liberal democracy. What they got was Weimar's inflation, debt, and utter craziness. So they turned right.

When you look at National Socialism, you find no social ties to the left. Draw the social connections between Stalin and the staff of the New Yorker in the 1930s, and you see an enormous bicep of lines reaching out across the Atlantic. Do the same with Hitler, and you’ll see nothing. He chose the right, which was just the absence of the left.

The same force begets Putin. What makes Putin a rightist is not that he's totalitarian — he's actually a very weak dictator. What makes him a rightist is that he's not part of the club — persona non grata to global liberalism. In comparison, Hitler was a monarch, but his regime was completely anti-liberal. That’s what made it right.

Further, the right is the absence of the left because you can identify the left tangibly, while you cannot distinguish the right. The left is part of a continuous tradition dating back to the 16th century. The first woke regime was Edward the Sixth, the radical Protestant Calvinist regime before Queen Elizabeth. Many qualities identified them as liberals.

So, when you realize rightism is the absence of leftism, you sense the absence of that something as a much larger space than the tangible something. You realize you don't have to be a liberal or a Nazi. But that dichotomy is the one offered today to high school students in America.

Woke or progressive?

I always say progressive; no one can attack you for saying progressive. It's their own word. It's historically accurate. It's not an insult. Woke is dead. You can't say woke anymore. Every label used for progressive people becomes contaminated.

Is progressive a complimentary label? Does it make you seem like the good guy? Yeah, that's why it's so evergreen, but progressive is just a euphemism for communism. The Gulag was a crime of progressivism.

If you have to label the opposition, I think counter-progressive is good.

Has X under Elon Musk made the New York Times more powerful?

He made them more powerful, and he made himself weaker — the direct result of 1990s tech libertarian ideology that Silicon Valley and the standard right-wing tech billionaires share…