'Yarvin is the brain' behind DOGE, Washington Post reports
The Washington Post finally got around to discovering Curtis Yarvin, the anti-democracy San Francisco blogger who Vice President JD Vance — his #1 fan — calls a “neoreactionary fascist.”
“Before gutting the federal workforce became Elon Musk’s job, it was Curtis Yarvin’s dream,” wrote Peter Jamison and Elizabeth Dwoskin in a May 8 story headlined “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.”
“Yarvin is the brain,” one unnamed source told the Post, explaining Yarvin's influence.
From the story:
Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger and software developer who argues for replacing American democracy with a dictatorship — spent years outlining an assault on what he calls “the cathedral” of elite power and consensus. Long before the U.S. DOGE Service launched in January, Yarvin coined his own four-letter acronym for bureaucracy-slashing: RAGE, or “Retire All Government Employees.”
Although he says he has never met Musk, Yarvin is a powerful influence among those carrying out DOGE’s radical cost-cutting agenda, two advisers to the effort said. One, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the group’s work, said Yarvin had offered “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is trying to achieve.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how Elon Musk's DOGE project was straight out of the Yarvin playbook. The Post gets confirmation from Trump administration officials that Yarvin is, indeed, the inspiration for DOGE:
Musk installed himself in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, his 4-year-old son and his video-gaming computer in tow, exhibiting a vision of executive power that looked to be straight out of Yarvin’s playbook.
The resemblance was no accident, according to the two people who have advised DOGE and are familiar with its leaders’ thinking.
“It’s an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin,” one of them said. “They were able to take the Curtis theory and use it to empower people on the ground to actually do stuff — even if they can’t admit it publicly.”
There it is — a very obvious fact that the nation's most powerful news organizations somehow managed to miss until May 2025. Now that the Washington Post has figured it out, can the New York Times political desk be far behind?
Read the entire piece at this gift link.
It is good to see major newspapers wake up to these realities. The main goal of my work has been to raise the awareness of other journalists. At the same time, I find it absurd that these papers, with their massive budgets and world-class teams of editors and reporters, are so late to the game.
Better late than never, I suppose. After all, it's not like American democracy is in jeopardy or anything. Moving on...
The Post story depicts Yarvin as disillusioned with DOGE:
In fact, in several recent interviews with The Washington Post, he offered a surprisingly harsh assessment of DOGE, comparing it to an orchestra of chimpanzees trying to perform Wagner. He also said the group’s attitude toward federal workers resembles that of a brash but insecure man who repels potential sexual partners.
“In the worst aspects of DOGE, there’s this aspect of the incel who gets mad at the girl who won’t sleep with him,” Yarvin said, using the term for so-called involuntary celibates. “That’s not a powerful attitude.”
Yarvin is clearly trying to distance himself from his own half-baked idea. But, in his typically incoherent fashion, he also wants to get credit for it.
The Post story does not mention the March 6 essay, “Barbarians and Mandarins,” in which Yarvin — repeatedly invoking the language of genocide — complains that the tech-MAGA fascist project will fail because it is not extreme enough. I analyzed that essay in an April 7 piece headlined “Curtis Yarvin Fears His Authoritarian Fantasy is Flopping.”
Newspapers tend to sanitize horror by using bland and supposedly neutral language to paint what Masha Gessen, in Surviving Autocracy, describes as a “blurry” picture of reality:
The pedantic insistence on only ever reporting empirically proven facts, and staying away from facts for which only logical, intellectual evidence can be summoned, creates the blurry style of American journalism. By using noncommittal statements, the blurry style in effect aids the Trumpian project of neutralizing the most important of media rights—the public’s right to know.
The Post piece is an important step forward because it shows that major U.S. media outlets can no longer ignore this story. But the piece also somehow manages to whitewash Yarvin and so, in true Beltway journalism fashion, continues to fall short.
This is a guy who once suggested the need for a “humane alternative to genocide” for “unproductive people.” And his ideas are now being tested in the White House.
Here's a five-minute video explainer of how Elon Musk's DOGE reflects Yarvin's playbook.
A Must-Read Book
The good news: U.S. media outlets are finally waking up.
The bad news: Yarvin is only the tip of the iceberg. The ideas coming out of Silicon Valley these days are a lot weirder and scarier than most people imagine.
If you want to understand those nightmarish ideas in great and entertaining detail, I highly recommend reading More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker. I started reading it on a recent plane ride and couldn't put it down.
I'll have more to say on this, but this book deserves the widest possible audience because the dangerous ideas Becker exposes are exerting tremendous influence on our lives in 2025.
Here's the official description of the book:
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow--and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason--for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity--at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What's more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
Don't be the last one to read it!
Tech Fascism in San Francisco
On July 14, I'll speak about tech fascism at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale, and you can attend remotely. Click here to buy tickets.