Frauds in the Wings: The Plagiarized Fantasy Behind New Right Politics
I’ve been hearing the name “Curtis Yarvin” a lot in recent weeks, mainly due to his connections to Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance.
In researching Vance’s ideological underpinnings the media is only just now discovering this Yarvin guy and his bizarre political philosophy. But I’d actually first come across Yarvin some years ago—not for any connection he had to the Trump movement, but the connection he had with the proactive male supremacist movement, the “seduction community,” and Andrew Tate.
Yarvin was the guy who coined the political use of the term “red pill.” It is of course a reference to the film series The Matrix, in which characters trapped in a computer simulation take a pill to break out and perceive the real world. For the various factions of the broader so-called “manosphere,” practitioners in various flavours of male supremacy, this movie was source material for a number of neat analogies. It meant women aren’t real, as men are. They are programmable entities understood and manipulated by becoming fluent in a type of code. Taking the red pill became key to seeing that men are permitted to believe they run the world but are in fact subjugated by the actual hidden masters.
Like the machines that allow us to believe we lord over them in The Matrix when they secretly enslave us, so too do women allow men to believe they too are not enslaved. It is up to men to take the red pill, see the truth, and restore their position in the true patriarchy. Some of them do this by wearing stupid hats and going to “Game” seminars.
When I wrote about this I explained how a hell of a lot of these people are closeted or ashamed geeks, overcorrecting for their un-alpha hobbies and interests while at the same time feeling that their underground geek and nerd abilities give them an edge. The escape from the incel trap is algorithmic, a solvable game.
All this is derived through Curtis Yarvin, who took this metaphor and changed some words to make it sound like his own idea after some years of just ripping off the movie. (He has also, at times, referred to the same concept as The Truman Show as if he needed to hammer home that his unoriginality isn’t even original). Instead of the Matrix now it’s “the Cathedral,” filling the role in society once taken by religion. Education and the media are part of this structure that has enslaved you with lies, and you know they’re lies because, well, they’re saying all this crazy stuff about racial equality and the dignity of human beings you find personally abhorrent.
Yarvin swapped out the fantasy terminology but Andrew Tate won’t shut up about it. Tate’s entire political philosophy, to the extent that he can be said to have one, is just Yarvin before Yarvin filed the Wachowskis’ serial numbers off his own body of work. Tate isn’t smart enough to mask the plagiarism.
Curtis Yarvin is more intelligent than Andrew Tate. I need you to understand that is not a compliment. There are species of lichen that are more intelligent than Andrew Tate. Yarvin, I feel, falls into a category of people who you might think of as stupid people’s idea of a smart person. Like Jordan Peterson or, as a matter of fact, Charles Manson. These are people who are skilled in using a lot of words to say nothing much at all.
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