What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Others Are Learning From Curtis Yarvin and the New Right | Vanity Fair
Part of why people have trouble describing this New Right is because it s a bunch of people who believe that the system that organizes our society and government, which most of us think of as normal, is actually bizarre and insane. Which naturally makes them look bizarre and insane to people who think this system is normal. You ll hear these people talk about our globalized consumerist society as clown world. You ll often hear the worldview expressed by our media and intellectual class described as the matrix or the Ministry of Truth, as Thiel described it in his opening keynote speech to NatCon. It can be confusing to turn on something like the influential underground podcast Good Ol Boyz and hear a figure like Anton talk to two autodidact Southern gamers about the makeup of the regime, if only because most people reading this probably don t think of America as the kind of place that has a regime at all. But that s because, as many people in this world would argue, we ve been so effectively propagandized that we can t see how the system of power around us really works.
This is not a conspiracy theory like QAnon, which presupposes that there are systems of power at work that normal people don t see. This is an idea that the people who work in our systems of power are so obtuse that they can t even see that they re part of a conspiracy.
The fundamental premise of liberalism, Yarvin told me, is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise. He believes that this premise underpins a massive framework of power. My job, as he puts it, is to wake people up from the Truman Show.
I like to listen to the NatCon podcast and find it only occasionally hair-raising. At bottom, I’m an unreconstructed Boomer Reaganite conservative, which means I’m basically a classical liberal, which means I’m a libertarian, which means I prefer to be left alone out West somewhere, but for my sins I’m here in SoCal, but at least it’s pretty and the weather’s nice. I miss Ronnie. Peter Thiel was born in Germany, you know, and is interesting enough, but is working hard on surveillance tech of his own at Palantir. Vance is wrong not to care about what is going on in Ukraine. Putin is a monster and so is the Russian Orthodox Church, or what it’s become. I could easily see the US slipping into something similar, all in the name of the common good. There’s no substitute for liberty, my friends.