Opposition research: Curtis Mead – The Good Phight https://www.rawchili.com/mlb/6196/ #Baseball #curtis #FrontPage #good #mead #MLB #opposition #phight #Rays #research #TampaBay #TampaBayRays #TampaBay #TampaBayRays #the
Opposition research: Curtis Mead – The Good Phight https://www.rawchili.com/mlb/6196/ #Baseball #curtis #FrontPage #good #mead #MLB #opposition #phight #Rays #research #TampaBay #TampaBayRays #TampaBay #TampaBayRays #the
In February, #Marc #Andreessen described the #Chatham #House group chats to the podcaster #Lex #Fridman as “the equivalent of [Soviet era] #samizdat”
“The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”
They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a podcast debate between #Mark #Cuban and the Republican entrepreneur #Vivek #Ramaswamy, which started in a chat.
But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media.
Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit #Curtis #Yarvin to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer #Taylor #Lorenz.
They succeeded at avoiding leaks (until, to a modest extent, this article) in part because of Signal’s and WhatsApp’s #disappearing #message features,
and in part because the groups had formed out of a mix of fear and disdain for journalists they believed were “out to get us,” as one member put it.
“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,”
said #Erik #Torenberg, an entrepreneur who was the first employee of the tech community hub Product Hunt.
As #Krishnan was setting up a set of tech group WhatsApp chats at a16z, #Torenberg independently founded a group of tech chats on WhatsApp and some more political Signal chats.
“They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast,
after claiming in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups.
“If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”
Their creations took off:
“It might not seem like it, because of all the sh*t that people still post on X, but the internet has fragmented,”
the Substack author #Noah #Smith wrote after my inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday.
“Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
https://www.europesays.com/2031501/ The Trade-War Panic Has Created the Perfect Opportunity to Buy the Dip #business #company #Curtis #despirito #Economy #healthcare #HealthcareService #LaborMarket #levine #lot #MoreInvestor #opportunity #recession #schulze #StockMarket #tariff #tariffs #TradeWar
https://www.europesays.com/1988208/ Curtis összeomlott Ázsiában bátyja életfogytiglani ítélete miatt #ÁzsiaExpressz #Curtis #CurtisTestvére #hír #hungary #ítélet #KatzenbachImre #Magyarország
Over recent decades, a computer programmer and prolific internet commenter has risen from the obscurity of forums and pseudonymous blogs to the pages of this newspaper,
as a friend to Vice President JD Vance and as a person who influences many of the people who influence President Trump.
Posting as Mencius Moldbug, #Curtis #Yarvin built a small but influential following among the more reactionary segments of the tech elite,
providing them with an elaborate and conspiratorial vision of a nation under the heel of a tyrannical and suffocating liberalism, a broad group of individuals and institutions he calls “the Cathedral.”
The path to national renewal, Yarvin argues, is to unravel American democracy in favor of rule by a benevolent C.E.O.-monarch drawn from a cadre of venture capitalists and corporate oligarchs.
With views like these, it is not difficult to understand how Yarvin won the admiration of powerful patrons.
He does little more than tell them what they want to hear.
If he had been born a minor noble scrounging for influence in the court of Louis XIV, he would have been among the first to exclaim the absolute authority of the king, to tell anyone who would listen that yes, the state, it’s him.
We do not have kings in the American Republic, but we do have capitalists.
And in particular, we have a set of capitalists who appear to be as skeptical of liberal democracy as any monarch.
They want to hear that they are the indispensable men.
They want to hear that their parochial business concerns are as vital and important as the national interest.
Aggrieved by the give-and-take of democratic life, they want to hear that they are under siege by the nefarious and illegitimate forces of a vast conspiracy.
And hungry for the kind of status that money can’t buy, they want to hear that they deserve to rule.
Yarvin affirms their fears, flatters their fantasies and gives them a language with which to express their great ambitions.
Never mind that the actual substance of his ideas leaves much to be desired.
Take his illuminating interview with The Times, in which he gives readers a crash course in his overall political vision.
He makes a studied effort to appear as learned and erudite as possible. But linger just a little on his answers and you’ll see the extent to which they’re underproofed and overbaked.
LA fires: Adam Brody, Leighton Meester lose home; Jamie Lee Curtis, Mark Hamill, Mandy Moore, James Woods and other celebrities forced to flee https://www.inbella.com/846899/la-fires-adam-brody-leighton-meester-lose-home-jamie-lee-curtis-mark-hamill-mandy-moore-james-woods-and-other-celebrities-forced-to-flee/ #actors #Adam #affected #among #and.. #Angeles #Brody #Celebrities #CelebritiesNews #Curtis #fires #flee #forced #Hamill #home #James #Jamie #la #Lee #leighton #Lose #Mandy #mark #Meester #Moore #musicians #other #people #tearing #tens #terrifying #Thousands #through #to.. #We're #Wednesday #wildfires #Woods #worldfamous
He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump
-- The obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration
-- #Curtis #Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics.
But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration
-- in particular over potential threats to US democracy.
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled,
is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance
and close to several proposed Trump appointees.
The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.
Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media,
Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone,
and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth
are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.
One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by #Michael #Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.
Although Yarvin once described Vance as a “random normie politician I’ve barely even met”
in a July Substack post, in October the Verge reported that “no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more”.
The growing parallels between the incoming administration’s actions
– especially Vance’s views
– and Yarvin’s suggestions raise questions about his influence.
Robert Evans, an extremism researcher and the host of the podcast "Behind the Bastards", recorded a two-part series on Yarvin.
“He didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades,” he said.
“He has influenced a lot of people in the incoming administration and a lot of other influential people on the right.
But a lot of the stuff he advocates is the same windmills Republicans have been tilting at for a while,” Evans continued.
“What’s unique is his way of rebranding or repackaging old reactionary ideas in a way that appealed to libertarian-minded kids in the tech industry,
and in eventually getting some of them to embrace a lot of far-right ideas,” he said.
“That’s the novelty of Yarvin and that’s his real accomplishment.”
-- Jason Wilson
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Tony #Curtis verstand Deutsch. Er ließ sich einige Folgen der dt. Fassung von “Die 2” schicken und war angeblich begeistert. Er schlug vor, das dt. Synchronstudio solle die Drehbücher der weiteren Folgen schreiben.
“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
Masters said to me.
“It’s a tangible enemy
—if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it.
And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said.
“But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”
I asked him about the term
Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters
and cool-kid cultural figures
as a sort of cultural vanguard.
“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,”
he told me,
“or if anyone actually does anything.”
“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks.
“I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”
“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”
He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.
“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”
I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel.
“Maybe, yeah,” he said.
“We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”
We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy,
both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place.
“I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said.
“And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.”
Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the #Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future,”
which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.
But to Masters, #Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world
and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives.
A few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters,
a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old.
I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign,
and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News,
including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink.
“Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked.
“These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson.
“You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ”
He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy
—so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there.
“That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.
At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area,
Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform:
on-shoring industrial production,
slashing legal immigration,
regulating big tech companies,
and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on.
I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these.
“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.
“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.
“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said.
It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was.
“I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”
He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”
Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres.
He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics.
But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years
is a hopeless dead end.
“A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet
IM—1776
recently.
“You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture.
And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”
“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me.
“I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”
He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance,
although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right.
Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents,
having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts
and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.
She said she was too “black-pilled”
—a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now
—to think much about what it would look like for her side to win.
“I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism.
Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”
“They’re going to come for everything,” she said.
“And I think it’s sinister
—not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister.
But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”
This is the Cathedral at work.
Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall
when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview.
There are signs that this may be happening,
though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.
“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy,
a Catholic convert and Bennington grad,
told me when I called her.
“I just want to have a family someday.”
Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee,
is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, "Wet Brain"
—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media.
But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.
Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene
—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene
—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding.
“Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me,
later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.”
I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said,
“Of course!”
She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,”
and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a
mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex.
“Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said.
The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefenstahl – Edie Sedgwick.”
The Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists,
back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance,
in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set.
One of them, Nekrasova,
actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018,
when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin.
“I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”
Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves
with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun.
Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession,
playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy;
the show itself set “right-wing Twitter”
—a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami
—alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases
such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”
The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable
dissident-y subculture,
centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan.
“Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,”
a bewildered friend of mine texted recently.
People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food
—guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset.
Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville,
which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,”
and which named one of its lines after John Galt,
the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
People are converting to Catholicism.
“It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.”
Milius was a sardonic and constant presence,
easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice.
She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there,
favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses.
She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius,
who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn.
She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan,
so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil.
She thought something had radically changed since 2015,
after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood,
before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada,
eventually landing a job in his State Department.
“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement.
So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism.
Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”
She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it,
was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream.
“I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place
where the left used to be at.”
What she meant specifically:
“The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.”
This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues
—or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues,
one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it,
that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life.
But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts.
Milius brought up "Red Scare",
a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction
—she’d actually cast one of the hosts, #Dasha #Nekrasova, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.
By the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013,
he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite.
In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”
The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like #Thiel and #Balaji #Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of #Coinbase,
and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to
“seize key positions of authority and power”
and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,”
just as the #Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism,
a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.
In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and #Milo #Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.
“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote.
“Just plays it very carefully.”
Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower.
He and Thiel worked,
generally without success,
to install figures like Srinivasan,
whom they proposed to head the FDA,
and who himself often talked about the
“paper belt,”
in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept,
and made common cause with figures like #Steve #Bannon, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state,
an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal.
Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area,
moving with his wife and two children to Nevada.
His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated,
publishing searching poems about her.
But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call,
inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it,
and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,”
to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.
“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me.
“So I answered this email and I was just like,
‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”
The two are now engaged.
Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic
and the protests of the summer of 2020.
“I started really getting drawn to #NRx ideas,” she said,
using a common online abbreviation for the
neo-reactionary fringe,
“because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“I have a background in social justice,” she said.
But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”
She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating,
discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years.
“I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me.
They just never told anyone about it,” she said.
“It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”
"No one directs this system,
and hardly anyone who participates in it believes that it’s a system at all.
Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories
and honestly describe political upheaval.
But within "the Cathedral", the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order,
which includes nationalists,
antigovernment types,
or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts
on issues like vaccine mandates,
in as alarming a way as I possibly can.
This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and has been sent into hyperdrive by Twitter and Facebook,
because the stuff that compels people to click on articles or share clips of a professor
tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten them, or both at the same time.
The more attention you gain in the Cathedral system, the more you can influence opinion and government policy.
Journalists and academics and thinkers of any kind now live in a desperate race for attention
—and in Yarvin’s view,
this is all really a never-ending bid for influence,
serving the interests of our oligarchical regime.
So I may think I write for a living. But to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a weird combination of intelligence-gathering and propagandizing.
Which is why no one I was talking to at NatCon really thought it would be possible for me to write a fair piece about them.
You won’t hear people use the "Cathedral" term a lot in public,
although right-wing Twitter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show last September.
People who’ve opened their eyes to this system of control have taken the red pill,
a term Yarvin started using back in 2007,
long before it got watered down to generally mean supporting Trump.
To truly be red-pilled, you have to understand the workings of the Cathedral.
And the way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued,
is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy
and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up.
As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym #RAGE
—Retire All Government Employees
—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.”
What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a
“national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”
Yarvin now shies away from the word "dictator" and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of #authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare:
“If you’re going to have a #monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.
As Moldbug,
Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences,
and in an early post, titled
“Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,”
he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing.
He told me he’d pursued those early writings in a spirit of “open inquiry,”
though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists.
Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed,
like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik
—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp
—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong
but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called
Norway’s “communist” government.
He argued that Nelson Mandela,
once head of the military wing of the African National Congress,
had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents,
and said anyone who claimed
“St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have
“a mother you’d like to fuck.”
He’s tempered himself in middle age
—he now says he has a rule never to
“say anything unnecessarily controversial,
or go out of my way to be provocative for no reason.”
Many liberals who hear him talk would probably question how strictly he follows this rule,
but even in his Moldbug days, most of his controversial writings were couched in thickets of irony and metaphor,
a mode of speech that younger podcasters and Twitter personalities on the highly online right have adopted
—a way to avoid getting kicked off tech platforms or having their words quoted by liberal journalists.
He considers himself a reactionary, not just a conservative
—he thinks it is impossible for an Ivy League–educated person to really be a conservative.
He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory,
because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academia
—an intertwined nexus he calls
“the Cathedral.”
He developed a theory to explain the fact that America has lost its so-called state capacity,
his explanation for why it so often seems that it is not actually capable of governing anymore:
The power of the executive branch has slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the educated
who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about America’s national interest.