Counter-Currents
Curtis Yarvin
1,574 words
Last Wednesday, Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, the father of the Neoreaction (NRx) movement, did a 75-minute interview with Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable TV news host in America. To be clear, this interview did not occur on Tucker’s nightly show but rather his online show, Tucker Carlson Today, which appears behind FOX’s paywall. You can watch it here.
While I am well aware of Yarvin’s ideological shortcomings, I still consider this to be a historic event for the Dissident Right — but not everyone agrees with me. As expected, there has been a lot of complaining about this on both the Left and Right.
On the Left, people are appalled that Tucker would interview someone who “supports terrorism” (based on some out-of-context quotes from a Moldbug article about Andres Breivik), or that Tucker would interview someone who “supports slavery” (based on some out-of-context quotes from a Moldbug article where he said that Africans were good at being slaves). This is what you would expect liberals to do. They take the work of someone who has written hundreds of thousands of words on an array of subjects, take a couple of snippets, and act like they represent the entirety of one’s thought, as if Unqualified Reservations was The Turner Diaries: The Blog.
On the Right, there was a lot of grumbling as well. Some have said that the mere fact that FOX is letting Yarvin on at all is proof that he is not dangerous. Some were claiming Yarvin was being promoted by the conservative establishment to serve as a gatekeeper. QAnon is fizzling out, and the “Intellectual Dark Web” wasn’t cutting it anymore, so the establishment had to offer up another distraction — something a little spicier to keep the proles from going White Nationalist, or so the argument goes. Yarvin is being called up to be the new gatekeeper, in this view.
Personally, I think the concept of “gatekeepers” is way overblown.
I am a believer in the “rabbit hole effect.” Basically, there is normie crap and then there is the rabbit hole. There are all kinds of branches, detours, and dead ends inside the rabbit hole, but once inside, people will eventually find their way to the bottom. Some may take longer than others, but they all get there. At the very least, they will hear all the arguments. The hard part is getting people to enter the rabbit hole in the first place.
Despite all his flaws — of which there are many — I still consider Moldbug to be in the rabbit hole. Anyone who starts following Moldbug is a hundred times likelier to encounter White Nationalist content than someone who just follows Sean Hannity or Dinesh D’Souza. If someone listens to a Yarvin interview or podcast, there will most likely be White Nationalists in the comments section making counter-arguments. Yarvin did a podcast with Aimee Terese, and she frequently retweets White Nationalists. Hell, last year Yavin even appeared on an explicitly White Nationalist TRS podcast. This is the “rabbit hole effect.”
Just by the nature of the online political sphere, I think it’s difficult for anyone who is even a millimeter inside the rabbit hole to gatekeep. Take a guy like Gavin McInnes. McInnes was actively trying to gatekeep, and yet he couldn’t stop the Proud Boys from defecting to the Alt Right. Antifa infiltrate all kinds of Alt Lite chatrooms and find people talking about the JQ and making edgy racist jokes. As Andrew Anglin said, “Once people start thinking outside the box, they start going in all kinds of directions.”
I think our enemies understand this better than a lot of people on the Dissident Right. This is why, when Big Tech decided to censor White Nationalists, they also took out the Alt Lite. A lot of people on the Dissident Right saw figures like Milo, Gavin McInnes, and Alex Jones as controlled opposition. They called them gatekeepers. Big Tech believed they were gateways. Honestly, I think Big Tech was right more often than not.
Take someone like Laura Loomer. She was a Jewish Zionist neocon. Sure, she said some inflammatory things about Muslims, but so do a lot of other Jewish Zionist neocons. You would think she would be the perfect example of a gatekeeper. But you know what? She was friends with Nick Fuentes and RamZPaul. And RamZPaul is friends with Matt Parrot, and Matt Parrot is friends with Mike Enoch. So even as cringe as Laura Loomer was, from her Twitter page, you were about four or five clicks away from GTKRWN. So yes, Big Tech was smart to ban Laura Loomer to prevent any potential rabbit-hole effect.
You can buy The Alternative Right, ed. Greg Johnson, here
This is why I am pleased to see Curtis Yarvin and Tucker Carlson team up. Whether it was their intention or not, sending some of the FOX audience Yarvin’s way will result in some of those people ending up being exposed to White Nationalism.
As for the interview itself, it wasn’t bad. It was Yarvin being Yarvin. He dropped some important red pills.
First of all, he dropped the big red pill that our democracy is an illusion. The term “Deep State” has been floating around the mainstream for a few years now, but I don’t think normies really understand the full implications of what it means. People have a vague idea that there are invisible forces behind the scenes fighting against the democratic will of the people, but are ignorant of the horrifying truth of just how powerful those forces are. They don’t know the extent to which our elected officials are little more than actors and marionets.
The “democracy is an illusion” pill is a big bombshell on its own, but Yarvin went a step further and explained that democracy would not be desirable even if it did function as it was supposed to. This is where Yarvin shines and where his greatest value lies. He is one of the best people around when it comes to critiquing democracy as a system.
Most people spend their entire lives taking it for granted that democracy is obviously superior to any other system. To suggest anything else seems absurd. It’s an even more unquestioned assumption than multiculturalism. Normies will sometimes debate the wisdom of flooding our countries with immigrants, but you never hear them debating whether democracy is a good idea. Hearing critiques of democracy for the first time can be really mind-blowing, and can potentially send people down the rabbit hole.
Yarvin also spent some time talking about the decentralization of power. When discussing America’s power structures, he said, “There’s no center to it.” I’ve seen a lot of people on the Dissident Right lose their minds over this. “There is a center! It’s the Jews! The media, the banks, academia! It all goes back to the Jews!”
I think people misunderstand what Yarvin i saying about the decentralization of power. He is correct in the sense that unlike in the past, there is no Versailles or Winter Palace that the peasants can storm to overthrow the system in one swoop. Power is not concentrated in one place, but everywhere.
Even if the January 6 Capitol protesters had dragged all the Congressmen out and hung them from lampposts, it wouldn’t have changed much. Big Tech would still be controlling our speech. There would still be banks. There would still be the intelligence services. There would still be the Military-Industrial Complex. We are dealing with a hydra. If you step on one of its heads, its other heads will bite you.
So in this sense, Yarvin is correct when he talks about power being decentralized. It’s something most normies don’t understand but something they need to. Sure, I would have loved for Yarvin to come out and say, “It’s the Jews!,” and that would have added some much-needed clarity, but he is not totally wrong here.
There are many more Moldbugian ramblings in those 75 minutes, but these are the most valuable concepts he brought to the conversation. Poor Tucker appeared thunderstruck trying to keep up, and even said a couple of times that he wasn’t smart enough to follow everything.
I was happy to see the interview happen, and hopefully a few normies who saw it will begin their journey into the rabbit hole. There are many White Nationalists who started their own journey with Yarvin. In fact, I think more people start with NRx and move on than stay with it.
You might say, “Well, those people started with old Yarvin. New Yarvin is a different animal.” There is some truth to this. One of the concepts that Yarvin 2.0 has been promoting since coming out of retirement is the “clear pill” – the idea that the establishment is not only invincible, but that fighting against the establishment makes it stronger, so you might as well do nothing. Will this make Yarvin less effective as a gateway? Will this cause the people he redpills to just give up? I don’t know. We’ll see.
My guess is that it will not. The problem with Yarvin 2.0 is that he doesn’t offer any hope. Few people can go through life without hope. It takes a special kind of nihilism to think, “The world is going to hell, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Gee, that’s a bummer. Oh, well. What’s on Netflix?” Most people, if they understand our predicament, are going to put up a fight.
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28 comments
Yarvin on Tucker is definitely a positive sign of change. I think Tucker really is “bored” with intellectually bankrupt conservatism and wants to look outside of the system for new ideas. And Yarvin has a goofy charisma that takes the edge off his reactionary politics in a way that can make him seem really innocuous. He can even play the Jewish card, which he did in a kind of shocking way, saying he wished he had a lifetime subscription to “international Jew” magazine (as an ironic joke).
The NrX advantage is that essentially their ideas are so weird as to not be obviously incendiary in the way that WN is by directly challenging the most sensitive issue of our time. Tucker can let Yarvin ramble for an hour and half without worrying that he will step on a landmine.
I think his weakest point (and what will not come off well with Tucker’s audience) was his defense of blue state elites (“his people”) as essentially good but misdirected people… Was he joking when he said they had the best taste? It’s not clear to me what sort of value system the new regime he calls for would have; would they be loyal to European civilization and the Aryan spirit?
I would have to say that the almighty dollar is the center, everything branches off that. I guess one could argue that jews are behind the dollar and they are probably right.
If you didn’t want the Ruling Class to be held accountable, you would tell people: “There’s no center to it!”
If you didn’t want people to work towards solving these problems, you would give them the “Clear Pill.”
Yarvin is clearly subversive in his intentions.
“Even if the January 6 Capitol protesters had dragged all the Congressmen out and hung them from lampposts, it wouldn’t have changed much.”
If a group of dissidents were capable of pulling that off, what else could they do?
Or that’s just the situation we find ourselves in. He’s absolutely right, there is no center to it. That being said, I don’t think their lock on power is nearly as secure as they think it is.
“Or that’s just the situation we find ourselves in.”
That’s passive language. There are people who created the situation that “we find ourselves in.” Specific and identifiable people who can be held accountable. Specific and identifiable people who can be removed from power. Why would Yarvin want to convince people otherwise?
Sure, those people have names. And addresses. The point is is that there isn’t one central point to hit and bring it down. This system is a hydra with many heads. Government, media, tech, WHO, UN, the list goes on.
That’s the apocalyptic scenario but I have doubts about a scorched earth policy civil war. While the diversity they’re trying to replace whites with in the military would probably follow those orders, they’re also terribly incompetent. I expect to see the US military become woefully ineffective in the not too distant future. Like, aircraft falling from the sky and nuclear vessels melting down levels of ineffectiveness.
The problem is that in order to do that, and to replace them with our own kind, would require such power that we would have effectively already won. The issue is, what do we do to get in that situation? Answer: we can’t. In that instance, nukes are relevant, as Biden said. We’ll never get to the point where we are storming the capital because those with real power would be nuking the Midwest and nerve gassing the South.
Our best hope is to get local and state power such that we can negate Fed overreach, and hang on till the inevitable collapse or a point where a confederation of states can break away peacefully (i.e., they have their own nukes and nerve gas.)
Yarvin noted his “Communist grandparents” and their basic attitude toward heartland Americans as peasants with pitchforks, both risible and frightening. His grandparents were Jewish Communists and this is the basic attitude of that Tribe toward us. With their combination of alienation, entitlement, resentment and paranoia, nothing is more “other” to them than a national identity based on blood and soil, with loathed Christianity to boot. Little has changed.
Guess who I learned this from. Dennis Prager.
I got to say; Tucker has been heading in the direction of Dissident thought for some time. The last few times I saw him on a TV snippet, he seemed genuinely frustrated and angry that Washington could not govern effectively and only perpetuate their own lavish lifestyles. Seeing that Moldbug and Tucker got together is a very encouraging sign. Though FOX audiences seem to like Hannity, Ingraham and Gutfeld; Tucker actually seems to be genuine and not obsessed with presenting everything as a joke.
Having seen the Dissident Right and come to understand the true nature of the reality I live in, I think Tucker will be a major lynch-pin in the future. Like the article above says, if you get to the rabbit-hole there is no way out; you are compelled to reach the bottom and uncover the truth.
Thank you to all of the internet channels that opened my eyes to reality–I have taken the red-pill and have seen how deep the rabbit-hole goes”; as well as the continued excellence of Counter-Currents itself, the thoughtful articles and dry wit has been a balm to my intellect. May we all continue to tear out the cancer of liberalism from our minds and hearts.
Just more Jewish mind-tricks. Nothing to see here.
Yeah, this guy is always pulling my leg. I don’t get why Yarvin is held in high esteem (or just highly respected). I think he is a b.s.’r who rambled in his blogs.
It’s fascinating to watch Tucker on his political journey, though. And having Yarvin on his show is part of that.
The term “Deep State” has been floating around the mainstream for a few years now, but I don’t think normies really understand the full implications.
From The Guardian, 2017:
“L’Obs cited three anonymous sources with knowledge of the emergency plan that would have been put into effect had Le Pen reached the Elysée palace, saying it was devised by a small group of ministers, chiefs of staff and top civil servants . . . The plan was aimed mainly at preventing serious civil unrest and “freezing” the political situation by convening parliament in emergency session and maintaining the outgoing prime minister in office. Police and intelligence services were particularly concerned by the threat of extreme violence from mainly far-left protesters in the event of a Le Pen victory.”
Sounds just like what I’ve always imagined a Deep State to be.
“Neo-reactionary”: I like that designation.
An interesting article on Moldbug ; https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/08/investigative-reports/the-father-the-son-and-the-mencius-moldbug/
That was rather interesting. Is that website good in general?
I would hate to see what would have happened if a “white supremacist” or dissident rightest had been found in possession of bomb making materials like that!
I had never even heard of that Yale pipe bombing event. Goes to show how thoroughly memory holed it was.
If Tucker Carlson is open to Mencius Moldbug, there is the potential for other media figures who would be open to more representatives of the Dissident Right.
Consider the value of getting Greg, Jared or even Paul Kersey of SBPDL onto a mainstream channel for a serious interview. Such a move could really make things go viral.
I wish Tucker would have Greg Johnson on his show.
Now THAT would be worth watching !
Now you know that ain’t happenin.
That being said, back before America became literally insane, Whoppi Goldberg had a late-night talk show and she had Terrible Tommy Metzger on as a guest–no audience, just her and him. It was the most fair shake I have ever seen a media person give not only to Metzger, but to anyone in “our thing.” They actually sat down and had that “honest conversation about race” all the jews are constantly lecturing everyone about. Not a chance in hell that could happen today.
Any critique of ‘democracy’ ends up being a critique of the concept of non-violent ‘legitimacy’ itself.
As I have said before, everyone who advocates for ‘authority’ or ‘hierarchy’ always assumes they’ll be the authority and that they’ll be at the top of the hierarchy.
Yarvin’s argument has not appeal to Big Grill. That’s why he’s out there. To give people ‘edgy’ but still stupid ideas that can keep the White Right spinning its wheels and pushing away the people who really need them and would be the most loyal: Big Grill.
Why doesn’t anyone understand that you cannot get very far with the dispossessed and demoralized White masses by telling them that they’re worthless and that you have no need for them.
Any White Nationalist would be better off reading the Left than anyone on the generic Right.
White Identity Nationalist (WIN) literature is the only really serious literature ‘on the Right’ and that’s because it’s not a right-wing ideology. If anything, it’s a left ideology that turned its back on racial romanticism (‘equality’).
Yarvin might be a strange-attractor, but no one should take his ideas seriously. None of them are original and his particular ‘spin’ on his purloined ideas are demotivating.
You have made some good points.
Completely agree. Plus the constant shitting on democracy gets old. I realize there are some perfectly legitimate critiques of modern liberal democracy out there, but it’s not necessarily the poison many dissident rightists think it is. If America were a real democracy with majority rule, we would never have gotten de-segregated schools, the Immigration Act of 1965, the “Civil Rights” Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, gay marriage, protection of trans-beasts, etc. Whether democracy has been a problem in the US is debatable. Whether lack of democracy and rule by elites has been a problem is not.
I think when they say democracy, they actually mean universal suffrage. I would love to live in a nation where the only people who could vote were land owning white men who had served in the military. The fact that Shaniqua’s vote counts just as much as mine, if not more, is insulting.
Any critique of ‘democracy’ ends up being a critique of the concept of non-violent ‘legitimacy’ itself.
As I have said before, everyone who advocates for ‘authority’ or ‘hierarchy’ always assumes they’ll be the authority and that they’ll be at the top of the hierarchy.
Yarvin’s argument has no appeal to Big Grill. That’s why he’s out there. To give people ‘edgy’ but still stupid ideas that can keep the White Right spinning its wheels and pushing away the people who really need them and would be the most loyal: Big Grill.
Why doesn’t anyone understand that you cannot get very far with the dispossessed and demoralized White masses by telling them that they’re worthless and that you have no need for them.
Any White Nationalist would be better off reading the Left than anyone on the generic Right.
White Identity Nationalist (WIN) literature is the only really serious literature ‘on the Right’ and that’s because it’s not a right-wing ideology. If anything, it’s a left ideology that turned its back on racial romanticism (‘equality’).
Yarvin might be a strange-attractor, but no one should take his ideas seriously. None of them are original and his particular ‘spin’ on his purloined ideas are demotivating.
Any critique of ‘democracy’ ends up being a critique of the concept of non-violent ‘legitimacy’ itself.
As I have said before, everyone who advocates for ‘authority’ or ‘hierarchy’ always assumes they’ll be the authority and that they’ll be at the top of the hierarchy.
Yarvin’s argument has no appeal to Big Grill. That’s why he’s out there. To give people ‘edgy’ but still stupid ideas that can keep the White Right spinning its wheels and pushing away the people who really need them and would be the most loyal: Big Grill.
Why doesn’t anyone understand that you cannot get very far with the dispossessed and demoralized White masses by telling them that they’re worthless and that you have no need for them.
Any White Nationalist would be better off reading the Left than anyone on the generic Right.
White Identity Nationalist (WIN) literature is the only really serious literature ‘on the Right’ and that’s because it’s not a right-wing ideology. If anything, it’s a left ideology that turned its back on racial romanticism (‘equality’).
Yarvin might be a strange-attractor, but no one should take his ideas seriously. None of them are original and his particular ‘spin’ on his purloined ideas are demotivational.
‘Ey Tone. If it’s called a Cathedral, where are all da Catholics? Heh heh.’ – Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri.
I knew of Yarvin/Moldbug, but had never read him. I’ve watched about 45 minutes of the Carlson interview now, and I have to say – while Travis LeBlanc’s point about gatekeepers and rabbit holes is interesting and valid, the critics of Yarvin absolutely have a point. Many points. He claims the woke class, which clearly sees the dissident as an enemy, will not seek to harm you if you keep your head down. This is false.
Yarvin claims there are no visible ‘wires,’ no puppet strings tying the universities and media and government together, when there clearly are. Yes, it IS like a hydra and has multiple heads, but to claim there are not central nodes or pressure points that could be eliminated that would seriously harm the hydra is again ridiculously disingenuous. And Yarvin has, thus far, made zero mention of the corporate role in all of this. And, as Travis LeBlanc notes, Yarvin makes no mention of the JQ. Extraordinarily ironic that he refers to the managerial class as ‘my people,’ yet admits his grandparents were immigrant communists. He was the child of an FSO – well, I was an FSO, and I never considered them all to be ‘my people.’ And yet Yarvin then has the gall to travel around continental America and call it a wonderful country – tremendous amount of tunnel vision there.
And he claims the colleges and media select for extremely bright and capable and competent people. Again, completely false – and he has to have known it was false when he was at Brown in 1991. I knew it was false when I was at college in the late 1970s. For every bright person you meet at ‘prestigious’ colleges, you find 10 extraordinarily dull ones – and these are generally NOT the legacy admits – these are people from NY and CA who may have different but equally obnoxious accents, but they think and behave in precisely the same, entitled way. The legacy admits I knew were actually a lot more modest in their bearing.
Yes, a great deal of today’s ‘progressivism’ can be traced to Woodrow Wilson, but Wilson didn’t come out of a vacuum. And again, to claim it all came out of traditional ‘power nodes’ like Harvard and Yale, while making absolutely no mention of the changing demographics at those power nodes, is deliberately obtuse. And he’s claiming the ‘hard sciences’ are fine – that there’s not such a thing as ‘woke math,’ when wokeness has invaded every field, including math and medicine and all aspects of science – again, Yarvin has his own enormous blind spots. So all of our troubles today go back to the ‘government’ granting authority/superiority to an unelected intelligentsia? What, was there no self-aware ‘intellectual’ class before Wilson? Were there no philosophers prior to 1921? He might as well come out and say “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
I’m just to the point where he starts talking about Covid and a lot of people dying, and I’ve had more than enough of that shite; I can’t watch anymore. Anyhow, I’m not impressed – with his ideas, nor with his ‘I’m a clever boy’ voice, nor with his extraordinarily unappealing visage. I hear a great deal of misdirection and partial truth. If he leads anyone to the rabbit hole of questioning the narrative, great, but he’s hardly the seminal figure he thinks himself to be.
I’d just like to underscore 3g4me’s observations and add an early Wittgenstein quote, “That which can be said, can be said clearly.”
Yarvin is unable to speak clearly. It’s all subterfuge and crypsis. Why is that?
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