Andrew Marantz

Andrew Marantz is a self-described Nazi-hating writer.

Treatment of Curtis Yarvin

In his book, Antisocial, Marantz writes, on page 156, with regard to Mike Cernovich, "He read a blog by an autodidact named Mencius Moldbug, who argued that American democracy was a failed experiment that should be replaced by totalitarianism." The footnote says:

Moldbug's essayistic voice exemplified the BSB [Big Swinging Brains] attitude -- blithely dismissive of received wisdom, self-assured to the point of hubris. A dropout from a PhD program in computer science, he approached the entire corpus of philosophy, history, and political theory with the swagger of an engineer, setting out to flout convention and reinvent the wheel. "The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology," his first post began. "People have been talking about ideology since Jesus was a little boy. At least! And I'm supposedly going to improve on this? Some random person on the Internet, who flunked out of grad school, who doesn't know Greek or Latin?" He raised these hypothetical questions, of course, only to dismiss them. He went on to imply that his lack of formal qualification was actually one of his primary qualifications, because it enabled him to see through the tissue of lies that he called the Cathedral -- a system of brainwashing so total, so self-erasing, that even to notice it was to become a pariah.

Beginning in 2007 and ending in 2014, Moldbug unfurled his bespoke ideology on his blog, Unqualified Reservations. He wrote in a prolix, purple style, a hybrid of Thomas Carlyle and Tom Robbins. His blog became a canonical text in the alt-right, although he never self-identified with the movement -- he usually called himself a formalist, while his followers usually called him a neoreactionary. Moldbug taught himself world history via Google Books, and his essays drew on a perversely eclectic array of primary sources, the more obscure the better -- Gaetano Mosca, Francis Yeats-Brown, Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He had no truck with settled historical debates, points of academic consensus, or universal politico-ethical axioms along the lines of "Freedom is desirable" or "People should be treated equally." In a post called "Why I am not an anti-Semite," he began by noting that his father was Jewish, then continued to hold forth dispassionately on the Jewish Question. Another post, called "Why I am not a white nationalist," was relatively ambivalent -- "I'm not exactly allergic to the stuff" -- and it linked approvingly to Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, and other racist crimethinkers. Moldbug declared himself a full-throated defender of "human cognitive biodiversity," the idea that there are inherent racial differences in IQ -- about which, he suggested, "white nationalists [are] right, and everyone else [is] wrong."

In 2017, Joe Bernstein, of Buzzfeed, published a piece exposing emails sent to and from Milo Yiannopoulos. The piece revealed, among other things, that Yiannopoulos was in close contact with Moldbug, whose real name was Curtis Yarvin, and that Yarvin had spent the night of the 2016 election at Peter Thiel's house. When Yiannopoulos suggested that Thiel "needs guidance on politics," Yarvin responded, "Less than you might think! . . . He's fully enlightened, just plays it carefully."

The book seems to suggest that Yarvin is supportive of white nationalism. Yarvin wrote, "I can imagine one possibility which might make white nationalism genuinely dangerous. White nationalism would be dangerous if there was some issue on which white nationalists were right, and everyone else was wrong. Truth is always dangerous. Contrary to common belief, it does not always prevail. But it’s always a bad idea to turn your back on it."

Marantz quotes Yarvin as saying, "white nationalists [are] right, and everyone else [is] wrong."