The Moldbug Variations – Palantir’s Peter Thiel Invests In Curtis Yarvin Company Tlon
WELL, WELL, WELL.
Three years ago, Peter Thiel called me a conspiracy theorist at a Baffler-hosted debate in New York between him and David Graeber. What prompted the characteristically winking and dismissive Thielian deflection was a question from a New York Times reporter, concerning a story on this very blog by yours truly. The story detailed connections between the democracy-loathing venture capitalist and a prolific, flowery neo-feudalist blogger who called himself Mencius Moldbug.
Moldbug was comfortably anonymous, with a modest but influential following in Silicon Valley circles, until TechCrunch revealed his identity as Curtis Yarvin, a San Francisco software engineer whose strange and quixotic startup, Tlön, had garnered some investment capital from Thiel. Moldbug’s moribund blog remains one of the ur-texts of the “neoreactionary” movement, a subset of what is now euphemistically termed the alt-right, but which I characterized at the time—more accurately, I think—as the mouthbreathing Machiavellis of the silicon reich.
Yarvin suffered some modest career setbacks and conference disinvitations once his identity as Moldbug became common knowledge, but Thiel stood fast. I did not outright accuse Thiel of plotting some kind of monarchist coup with Yarvin, but in 2014 Thiel was apparently quite sensitive to the suggestion he might be in cahoots with the alt-right underground.
“Actually, I found that vaguely flattering,” Thiel told the Times. “It was the full-on conspiracy theory. In truth, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.”
Note that in his comment, Thiel denied nothing. Indeed, part of him seemed to enjoy the attention. I certainly delighted in the irony of being called a conspiracy theorist by a wealthy and well-connected serial conspirator—even though at the time, Thiel had yet to be exposed as the financier behind a covert legal campaign to defund and destroy his journalistic nemesis, Gawker Media, from existence.
Now let’s jump ahead to the first week of October 2017. BuzzFeed published a long expose based on leaked emails that revealed further coordination between alt-right personalities such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon, the heir to the late Andrew Breitbart’s online propaganda empire and, more important, a key adviser to Donald Trump.
Read More: The Moldbug Variations
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