I Know The Lesson Of 1933 That Says You Get Out Sooner Rather Than Later, But… I’m Staying To Fight

The Borg's Giant Surveillance Machine Being Deployed Against Us

Last week, British journalist Carole Cadwalladr took umbridge with the narrative that Musk failed at DOGE. “It’s nothing so much as a repeat of all the many dumb articles about how Musk ‘failed’ in his takeover of Twitter because he’d lost a ton of advertisers and hadn’t turned a profit. As if that was the point. You don’t buy a global propaganda weapon to turn a profit. You buy a global propaganda weapon to spread propaganda at a global scale. The idea that Musk teamed up with Trump because of his deeply held belief in streamlining federal spending is naive at best and journalistic malpractice at worst. His people are still in position across multiple departments in the US government. DOGE is going nowhere. And the real point of DOGE is not to save American taxpayers money. It’s a fundamental re-writing of the social contract, the relationship of US citizens to the state, and the state to private enterprise. Musk’s operatives have been systematically gaining access to databases across the US government and are now merging them… into a giant surveillance machine presided over by the dark lord of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel.” That’s the guy who carefully, systematically destroyed Gawker and who owns— 100%— (Vice President) JD Vance. 

Most Americans have never heard of Thiel or Palantir, which doesn’t mean they’re not fundamentally transforming America and shit-canning the experiment with democracy. Ditto for Curtis Yarvin and his plot against America. Ava Kofman reporting on the monarchist once known as Mencius Moldbug who argued that “egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills… Moldbug called for nothing less than the destruction [of media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus] and a total ‘reboot’ of the social order. He proposed ‘the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,’ and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into ‘a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.’ This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison ‘decivilized populations.’ It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called rage— Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including ‘security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.’ … For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite— a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.”

She reminded her readers that if Moldbug showed little affection for the masses, he still had a use for us. ‘Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky and Vaclav Havel,’ he wrote. ‘What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.’ The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet— a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, Unqualified Reservations, were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists— many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies.”

Early financial backers for Yarvin’s endeavors included Andreesen, Thiel and crypto-cartel warlord Balaji Srinivasan. “A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vive President Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,’ and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to DOGE, has started quoting his ‘good friend’ Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our ‘out of control’ bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat ‘the Cathedral,’ Yarvin’s shorthand for the mainstream media and the American university system Trump is now destroying.

“In 2022, [Yarvin] recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. ‘The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,’ he said… [H]e has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. ‘Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,’ Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of ‘the administrative state and the global postwar order.’ As his ideas have been surrealized in doge and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. ‘If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,’ he wrote two days after the election. ‘It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.’ What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient— a ‘vibes coup.’ Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: ‘He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.’”

Nonetheless, “[even] Trump’s most pessimistic critics,” she wrote, “have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch— and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth… Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas— like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy— don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies. Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was ‘an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.’ Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. ‘Did I hear someone say beachfront?’ he wrote on Substack. ‘The new Gaza— developed, of course, by Jared Kushner— is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.’ This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.’”

Great minds think alike? “Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. ‘The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,’ the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. ‘He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.’ It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity— fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it… ‘Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,’ he wrote in a Substack post in March. ‘You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?’”

Professor Marci Shore isn’t waiting around with her family to be foamed. She moved from Yale University to the University of Toronto., from the US to Canada. In 1969 I did something similar— I went to Europe and lived abroad for over 6 years, when Nixon took over the White House. I’m, 77 but if I was younger I might do it again. My grandmother, Jean— I introduced her yesterday— always said Jews were smarter than anyone else. They’re not but the gene pool was bolstered when the smartest ones left Europe before Hitler’s Nazi regime could kill them— and most of the Jews who didn’t leave. Marci Shore had no intention of taking that chance.

“Starkly,” wrote Jonathan Freedland yesterday, “Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. ‘The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.’ She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America— and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, 

We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances. 

I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.’ Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.”

“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”

…“The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology… in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.”

She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised— because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”

… [I]t was [Trump’s] lack of truthfulness that terrified her. “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,” she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast “eschatological vision,” the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is “advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.”

When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself “lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.”

Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. “We tore our hair out debating it.” Snyder’s instinct was to stay and fight: he’s a “committed patriot”, she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. “These things are so contingent; you can’t do a control study on real life.”

But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled… the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”

Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism”— to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on  “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”

… How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.”

She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”

It would be insane to write this off as “just” part of the American brain brain, as if that didn’t matter much. Yarvin ain’t going anywhere. Guerrilla warfare isn’t called for, not even close; helping make sure anti-Trump candidates are elected next year is what matters now— both in the House, where Democrats will absolutely take the majority if it’s a fair election, and in the Senate, where winning back the majority is a heavier lift but shrinking the GOP’s majority is a worthy and attainable goal.

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