RAGE Against the Machine

 

(Hat tip to Salon's Amanda Marcotte)

     Calling Curtis Yarvin the most dangerous man you've never heard of would be quite a stretch. Indeed, Yarvin, one of Peter Thiel's butt boys, used to be fringe. However, his 2012 manifesto delineating a philosophy called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) is getting reexamined. Not only that, it seems that tech billionaires, corporations and right wing think tanks are taking it much more seriously.

     When Yarvin put out the first version of his manifesto, three years before Trump came down the escalator, no one really (except for his sugar daddy Thiel) took him seriously, it was so fringe. What Yarvin called for was for the destruction of the federal government and the president of the United States to be reduced to a mere figurehead while the country was to be run by a CEO.

     Prior to Yarvin's once-laughable screed that called for "parachute ninjas" to land on the roofs of government buildings, the closest analog we have to this in American history was the attempted fascist takeover in the early days of FDR's administration. I've written about this a couple of times over the years but in case your history is a little rusty, let me bring you up to speed:

     Right after FDR was elected in 1932, horrified right wing oligarchs, terrified of Roosevelt's promised left wing agenda, engineered an attempted coup of our government. Remington was supposed to supply the rifles, Prescott Bush the financing and their undoing was to approach Marine General Smedley Butler to recruit an army of WWI holdovers to lead the revolt.

     Smedley Butler, of course, turned out to be the ultimate whistleblower and exposed their scheme before it even got off the ground. Still. despite Butler's revelations before a Congressional committee about the Business Plot, not a single one of the corporate scumbags ever saw the inside of a Congressional hearing room, much less a courtroom much less a prison cell. In fact, less than 20 years later, Prescott Bush got himself elected a US Senator out of Connecticut.

     Yarvin's roots are odd but not unheard of. His parents were liberal and secular. Yarvin's father, ironically, worked for the State Department as a diplomat. In fact, his parents were avowed Communists. It's tempting to see Yarvin instinctively rejecting his parents' values and turned to the dark side. Yarvin is an unabashed neoNazi and white nationalist who canoodles with virulent neoNazi and racist Nick Land.

     But Yarvin's so-called philosophy involves a takeover of government to the point of hollowing it out and replacing them with ideologues that nonetheless have some experience in government. The major difference between this and Elon Musk's current sabotage of the government is to bring in a bunch of punks who have no experience whatsoever in government.

     And Yarvin's dim worldview of American democracy, one that he views as a failed experiment, requires that the US government be replaced by a series of shell agencies subservient to an accountable monarchy, in other words, like a corporation run by a CEO.

     His plan would be considered laughable today if it wasn't eerily prescient of the Project 2025 we're seeing unfolding in real time before our horrified eyes. He's attracted the attention of tech billionaires, the Heritage Foundation that midwifed Project 2025, and even "Vice President" JD Vance. Part Star Trek, part Matrix, part fascist, dystopian nightmare, all it needs is gas chambers and ovens.

     It's not very much of a stretch to see Yarvin's plans for a Nazi takeover of the government  providing a foundation for what would become Project 2025, a 900+ page agenda that hates America and its democratic republic with the fury of 1000 suns. It's a bloated love song to white male Christian hegemony and it's easy to see Yarvin being the godfather of the insanity we're seeing today.

     But instead of ninjas on roofs, we're seeing juvenile delinquents running loose in the halls and offices of some of our most important institutions, with Elon Musk playing the part of some Silicon Valley version of Fagin. Yarvin's plan to take over the fourth and fifth estates we'd begun seeing long before the 2024 election. If you want to know why the major newspapers in this country aren't reporting on this ongoing espionage, consider that the Washington Post and LA Times are run by right wing billionaire psychopaths that refused to endorse Kamala Harris or say anything unflattering about Trump under the risible guise of political neutrality.

     And it's hardly surprising that Republicans in Congress are falling behind this fascist agenda since the Republican Party, for at least a century going back the days of Harding, have loathed democracy with all their black little hearts. They're sailing on a ship, meaning Congress, they're too stupid to realize is under fire from the very man they lionize. The Republican Party for the last century has always been evil, is evil now and always will be evil until it finally collapses under the sheer tonnage of its own corruption.