JD Vance is, as he admits, “connected to a lot of weird right-wing subcultures.” His much-mocked comments about childless cat ladies and unassimilated Italian immigrants come from a “masculinist” podcast. He doesn't eat seed oils, a dietary restriction that's extremely common online. When he was nominated to become former President Donald Trump's vice president, his X-following list included “Bronze Age Pervert” and “Raw Egg Nationalist,” two pseudonymous right-wing bodybuilders who frequently promote eugenics and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory . But perhaps no one on the Internet has shaped Vance's thinking more than neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer with ties to Vance's friend and benefactor Peter Thiel.
Yarvin — who has been blogging under the name Mencius Moldbug in recent years and is now on Substack — has long been something of a right-wing public intellectual. His work includes reflections on the connection between race and IQ, calls for a “benevolent dictator” to rule the United States, and contributions such as “Why I am not a white nationalist” (because white nationalism is “a very ineffective political tool for solving the problem.” ” is). “very real problems it is complaining about”). He once wrote that neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of people in a series of attacks in Oslo, Norway, was ineffective because he “didn't even score three figures.”
There is a tendency not to take people like Yarvin seriously. He and other right-wing bloggers like Bronze Age Pervert position themselves as provocateurs and frame their work in absurd metaphors – it sounds inherently ridiculous to issue warnings about a man who writes long essays about dark elves. And if you take them seriously, they will say they are just trolling. But if you look beyond his edgelord demeanor and baroque prose, Yarvin has spent the better part of a decade clearly describing what he wants: a dictatorship.
Yarvin is most often associated with the neo-reactionary movement, whose followers believe—as Thiel wrote in 2009—that freedom and democracy are incompatible and that democratic governments and bloated federal bureaucracies should be replaced by enlightened autocratic regimes.
Until relatively recently, Yarvin's name was not mentioned in mainstream political discourse. But his ideas for undermining democratic control of authoritarian power have resonated with current Republicans. Although Vance has not espoused Yarvin's more extreme ideas – and is unlikely to do so – he clearly holds parts of the neo-reactionary creed in high regard.
Looking beyond his edgelord demeanor and baroque prose, Yarvin has spent the better part of a decade clearly describing what he wants: a dictatorship
In a July Substack post, Yarvin denied that he had a “significant influence” on Vance. Yarvin called Vance “random.” Normie Politician I hardly know met.” (He has a penchant for italics.) “While I admire the senator and think he did it some “I have no potential,” Yarvin wrote, “he is barely a 'friend' of mine and I can't imagine that I have influenced him.”
Years before he became the Republican vice presidential nominee, however, Vance openly wielded that influence. “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who wrote about these things,” Vance said on a right-wing podcast in 2021. Vance didn't stop at simply naming names. He went on to explain how former President Donald Trump should reshape the federal bureaucracy if re-elected. “I think what Trump should do if I gave him advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every official in the administrative state and replace them with our people. And if the courts stop you, step before the country and say, 'The Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.'”
This “advice” is more or less identical to a proposal Yarvin floated in 2012: “Retire all government employees,” or RAGE.
As Yarvin describes, the purpose of RAGE is to “reboot” the government under an all-powerful executive branch, a kind of debugging. Yarvin views elections as ineffective methods of political change because while the head of state and his political representatives may change, the career bureaucrats (who, in Yarvin's view, are really in charge) remain in place. “If Americans want to change their government, they must overcome their dictator phobia,” Yarvin said in the 2012 speech describing RAGE. Since then, Yarvin has toned down the dictator's rhetoric (he recently called for a “monarchy of all”), but the underlying principle remains unchanged. For Yarvin, democracy is an illusion: elections make people believe they have a say, but the cathedral, his collective term for journalistic institutions and elite universities, rules everything. In this theory, the monarchy is the only honest government.
RAGE has obvious parallels to Trump’s war on the “deep state” of federal bureaucrats. In October 2020, Trump signed an executive order that removed employment protections for certain federal offices “from a confidential, policy-setting, policy-making, or policy-advocating chapter.” Federal agencies would also be encouraged to hire employees who pledged loyalty to the president. The new policy was named Appendix F, after the new employment category it would have created had Biden not repealed the order shortly after taking office.
Appendix F was a radical idea wrapped in the sanitized language of federal bureaucracy. His goal was to concentrate power in the presidency and undermine what Trump (and other far-right parties) call the “deep state” and what Vance has repeatedly referred to as “the regime.” The regime goes beyond liberals or Democrats – it includes mainstream politicians from both parties whose main goal is to maintain our current political order.
Yarvin's Cathedral takes this argument one step further, extending the intrigue beyond Congress, the White House, and the courts; The media and elite universities are also included. While others on the right support efforts to take over universities and elite institutions and dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Yarvin writes that these tactics will likely only “strengthen progressive cultural power.” He's kind of an all-or-nothing doomer; His ultimate vision is an American monarchy led by a “national CEO,” or in Yarvin’s own words, “a dictator.” (Trump famously said he would not be a dictator in office “except on day one.”)
And if Trump wins, Yarvin's RAGE proposal could be back on the table. Appendix F is among dozens of policy proposals buried in the 2025 version of the Heritage Foundation's nearly 1,000-page document Mandate for leadership. If implemented, tens of thousands of federal employees could be affected. Appendix F is legally dubious, but how Politically has stated that the current composition of the Supreme Court could still allow it to move forward.
If the courts don't side with Trump, Vance suggested just this year, he should proceed anyway. “When the president-elect says, 'I have control over the staff of my own government,' and the Supreme Court steps in and says, 'You can't do that' – that's the constitutional crisis.” It doesn't matter what Trump or whoever decides in response,” Vance said Politically Months before he became Trump's vice presidential running mate.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, sees the think tank's role in the “institutionalization of Trumpism” and is a friend of Vance, whom he calls “one of the leaders – if not the leader – of our movement.” Under Roberts, Heritage has shed its former identity as the home of free trade fanatics and Reagan Republicans and fully embraced an ultra-nationalist MAGA ethos. Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts' book The early light of dawnwhose release date was pushed back from September to November after the election.
Cultural heritage is not alone in this transformation. The right-wing think tank ecosystem has been completely redesigned since 2016 based on Trump's model. The far-right fringe groups have now taken over the mainstream, pushing an exclusionary vision of America and all that comes with it – a vision in which nuclear families are led by an all-powerful manager who is accountable to nothing and no one. The Claremont Institute, once quite traditional, is now the self-proclaimed intellectual MAGA brain trust. Michael Anton, a former Trump administration official and Claremont fellow, wrote about the book “Bronze Age Pervert” for the Claremont Review of Books; His review noted that Yarvin had gifted him a copy.
Yarvin is by no means Vance's only influence. As Politically'S Ian Ward wrote: “Vance's worldview was shaped by a variety of right-wing thinkers, including the Catholic intellectual Patrick Deneen and the French philosopher René Girard, but it was also influenced by people like Thiel and Yarvin.” If you remove the veneer of respectability, that Heritage and Claremont, the layers of irony behind which Yarvin hides his views, and the academic credentials of Vance's other influences, it becomes impossible to ignore the extreme nature of their proposals.
Vance is smart enough not to publicly quote Yarvin now that he's the vice presidential candidate, and he hasn't publicly supported some of the blogger's more repugnant views. But that doesn't mean it's not connected.