Curtis Yarvin’s Racist Slurs Haven’t Scared Off JD Vance
His slurs are public. His ideas are toxic. But to men like JD Vance, Yarvin is still worth following.
Curtis Yarvin appears to be suffering from a terrible addiction.
I’m not talking about drugs, though media reports suggest he has done large amounts of them. No, I'm talking about a different kind of compulsion.
To put it simply, Yarvin appears to be addicted to the “N-word.” Yarvin uses the inflammatory anti-Black slur with conspicuous frequency.
A recent New Yorker profile revealed that he even found a way to make his AI chatbot use the epithet. And his ex-girlfriend told the magazine she had pressured him to stop using the word—“at least around her.”
But Yarvin just can't help it. He goes out of his way to indulge in raw, vicious, anti-Black racism.
Case in point: On July 30, the attention-hungry pseudo-intellectual caused a stir on Twitter when he used the word while making a strange attack on right-wing billionaires.
In a series of posts, Yarvin ranted against wealthy Republican political donors for what he portrayed as their strategic incompetence. He argued that liberal billionaires have spent decades building powerful institutions. Right-wing billionaires, he complained, have failed to do the same. Instead, he claimed, they naively rely on “free speech” platforms instead of building institutional power like liberals did.
This critique is silly and nonsensical. Republicans have built powerful cultural, political, and media institutions. They are winning the information war with a full suite of outlets pumping out disinformation—Fox News, Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, and more. And groups like the Heritage Foundation have enacted a plan—Project 2025—to destroy large parts of the U.S. government.
But Yarvin’s critique wasn’t really the point. It was just his latest excuse to inject racism into public discourse. He used a shortened version of the N-word to describe the right-wing billionaires he accuses of failing to counter liberal influence. (Ironically, some critics mocked him for being racist enough to use the slur, but not bold enough to spell it out.)
There is no need to dissect the reasons for Yarvin’s gutter racism. It is exactly what it appears to be. This is a man who wears racial hatred as a badge of honor—and who clearly doesn't come into contact with people of color on a regular basis. Yarvin, who hides behind a screen, wouldn't have the guts to utter these slurs on the street. In the real world, that kind of talk tends to carry consequences.
Instead, he flings epithets from the safety of his tony Craftsman home in ultra-liberal Berkeley, performing racism online for an audience of anonymous far-right Twitter users who pay $8 a month for a blue check. Sigmund Freud would twist himself into a pretzel trying to diagnose the warped psychology at work.
Unfortunately, the anonymous Twitter racists aren’t the only ones following Yarvin. Billionaire Peter Thiel funded Yarvin for years and considers him an important philosopher. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s tech startup and has been known to accompany him to brunch. JD Vance has named Yarvin as one of his influences and recently followed him on Twitter. Elon Musk consulted Yarvin last month when he was thinking about starting a new political party. These powerful, influential men have gone out of their way to elevate Yarvin and force us to take his ideas seriously.
This reveals something deeply troubling about our political moment. Yarvin's compulsive racism isn't a bug in the system—it’s a feature. He wraps white supremacist ideas in faux-intellectual packaging, playing the jester who says what powerful white men won’t say out loud. But their support for him is an unmistakable endorsement of the hate he spreads.
Not exactly surprising. But since when can someone openly praised by the vice president of the United States publicly spew racist slurs without a word of condemnation?
His admirers call him a visionary political thinker with a blueprint for remaking the world. In reality, Yarvin is a middle-aged juvenile malcontent who tweets racist epithets in a desperate quest for attention.
The real question isn't why Yarvin can't stop using racial slurs. He clearly has lost control of his bizarre obsession. The real question is why some of the most powerful men in the United States—including the vice president—insist on following and boosting him.
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