Somebody Should Ask JD Vance About The Fascist Who Installed His Operating System
Somebody Should Ask JD Vance About The Fascist Who Installed His Operating System
Yes, this is about that Maddow piece last night.
To preview tonight’s vice presidential debate between human being Tim Walz (D) and butthair cyborg JD Vance (R), Rachel Maddow last night took a long look at yet another set of bizarre, disturbing things Vance has said on rightwing podcasts, a genre that may never be fully mined. And yikes, there’s no bottom to the weirdness mine.
Tenured Radicals! Free Love, Too!
Maddow started in her beloved goofy roundabout fashion with the story of drugstore magnate Charles R. Walgreen, who in 1935 sparked a panic about “Reds” at the University of Chicago because his niece argued about politics with him. Walgreen tried to get the Illinois Legislature to shut the university down because it was indoctrinating innocent young people not only with communism, but also with “free love.” (It was a long intro! Here’s part of it, which includes the Vance clips mentioned below. Full transcript of the segment here.)
Maddow briefly sketched out some other attempts to shut universities down, noting that they’ve all had ties to unsavory fascist (or fascist-adjacent) figures, then brought things into the present with clips of JD Vance complaining about how universities “are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies,” ideas he expounded on in a 2022 speech called “The Universities are the Enemy” at the National Conservatism Conference, that creepy bunch of rightwing thought leaders we’ve mentioned previously at Wonkette.
She also treated us to snippets of Yale Law graduate Vance attacking “elite” universities, especially Harvard, and suggesting their endowments should be seized by conservative leaders, to save America. Not only that, but he calls for government imposing “economic pain” on corporations that espouse positions conservatives think are harmful, again, because America is in peril. One host Vance spoke with said it’s time to take “extraconstitutional” actions, to which Vance readily agreed, “Yes, that's exactly right.” And that gets us to Maddow’s real story, focused on Curtis Yarvin, an authoritarian rightwing blogger who’s been surprisingly influential among rightwing tech dudes like Peter Thiel, Vance’s personal leash-holder.
Who Formatted JD Vance’s Floppies?
Here’s the rest of the segment, featuring Vance talking with rightwing podcaster Jack Murphy in 2021 about “the current American leadership class” and its entire culture, including the institutions it has “corrupted,” like universities and pretty much all of government.
Our leaders right now are so corrupt and so vile that, if you assimilate into their culture, you're assimilating into like garbage liberal elite culture. You're not assimilating into traditional American culture.
That culture is so dangerous that conservatives will need to “totally replace, like, rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class, and then reinstall some sense of American political religion.” (Emphasis added.)
Murphy noted some that tumor-removal can be done “with votes,” but it’s a really big job that might require … well, some of that “extraconstitutional” action, not that Vance spelled it out. Instead, Vance suggested viewers Do Their Own Research and consult the political thought leader who inspired him (and Thiel, and other rightwing tech bros):
MURPHY: So, these institutions are corrupted and rotted to the core. This elite ideology is everywhere and in all the things. What other options do we have besides voting them out, which we're seeing is ineffectual?
VANCE: Yeah. So, again, this is, like, a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now.
The video then cuts to Vance’s suggestion for what to do beyond voting: “I — there's this guy Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things.”
Maddow then offers some clips of a speech by Yarvin, a blogger who has for nearly two decades advocated a “reboot” or “reset” of American government that would eliminate all our cultural rot — that means you and me and anyone who watches Rachel Maddow, for starters — and make America all better again, as Vox explained in a 2022 profile of Yarvin’s creepy ideas.
[Yarvin] stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
If the Maddow piece worries you, then you should absolutely follow up by reading the Vox story, as well as this more recent New Republic piece about Yarvin and his “Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas.”
‘It All Needs To Be Destroyed’
Yarvin is a guy, kids, who made a funny joke in 2008 about how all the “not productive” people in San Francisco could be rounded up and then finally made useful to the city: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.” Just kidding, only serious.
The Maddow segment offers a few clips from one of Yarvin’s speeches (which coulda used onscreen captions, since the audio wasn’t great), in which he offers a cute acronym for how to fix America: “RAGE,” which stands for “Retire All Government Employees” because people who know stuff are the source of all our woes. A government, he explains, is “just a corporation which owns a country, nothing more, nothing less” (which, no, it damned well isn’t), so why not just do a corporate takeover and “delete” the old version? “We haven't been able to do that with our government for 200 years,” Yarvin said. “So it's gotten a little bit stale.”
The Constitution? Elections? Bill of Rights? Hey, tough, when there’s a new boss, there’s new rules so you can do a complete reorganization.
While he’s at it, Yarvin would yank out all the supporting institutions that keep American society going — and going the wrong way, obviously.
The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can't just say, well, the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is the system actually?
And it includes a lot of things that are called NGOs, things that are called universities, things that are funded by the state. It's a very, very large system. And it all needs to be destroyed.
Happily, Yarvin says, there are “a lot of talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work and are generalists,” so you’d just put them in power to replace the corrupt folks who messed everything up! No, you would not elect them, don’t be silly. People would make bad choices.
And, finally, you need a CEO. And a national CEO is what's called a dictator. It's the same thing. There's no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they are going to have to get over their dictator phobia.
And that’s Curtis Yarvin, the guy “who's written about some of these things” and has some very specific plans for ripping out the American ruling class like a tumor. Can’t leave it there, or any of its institutions, because tumor, right? You have to excise everything.
So yeah, can’t imagine why Vance only suggested that people read up on Yarvin, and then he and Murphy shared an uncomfortable giggle. Maddow summarizes:
This is literally a pro-dictatorship, pro-monarchy philosophy that is not just about ending the US system of government, deleting the US government, but then using the power of a dictator to dismantle universities, dismantle businesses, to dismantle all of civil society, to instead install a whole new system controlled by the state that serves just the desires of the dear leader.
Probably something to ask Vance about at the debate tonight, since he’s the one who’d become the chief executive if Trump is finally felled by a hamberder three weeks into a second term.
[Maddow Transcript at RealClearPolitics / Vox / New Republic]
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I've been waiting for everyone to start talking about Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug. Dude is a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic. My brother tried reading some of his stuff a couple of years ago, just to see what it was about, and when he got to the monarchy thing he did whatever the blog version is of hurling a book across the room.
I thought the idea of starting this country was to Get Rid Of someone exactly like this.