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Billed as ‘the Philosopher behind JD Vance’, Curtis Yarvin appeared in conversation with former New Labour communications chief and hit podcast co-host Alastair Campbell at the philosophy, comedy, and music festival How the Light Gets In in London on Sunday.
The discussion was wide-ranging but fairly random, covering the political blogger Yarvin’s distrust of democracy and his belief that CEOs should take over the state in the form of a modern monarchy.
In his provocative style, Yarvin twice told the audience that he refers to the UK as ‘YUK’, and wondered whether late-night London is now more dangerous than it was in Elizabethan times.
What the event did not explore was Yarvin’s more controversial views as expressed extensively through his writings.
When Byline Times asked Yarvin, during questions from the audience, about his use of an AI app to display the N-word on his phone while at a meeting with Labour peer Lord Maurice Glasman – as documented by the New Yorker – he did not dispute that this happened, but compared the use of the inflammatory pejorative to blasphemy, adding that “no words should be kryptonite”.
Asked whether he was an advocate of ‘pseudo-science’ on racial differences in intelligence, Yarvin disputed that his writings were in any way more unscientific than the ‘blank slate’ theory that all “children were born interchangeable”.
He appeared to double-down on his theory by noting that the majority of the audience for his discussion was white – as if this was proof of anything but the cultural milieu of the festival.
Though Yarvin – whose thinking is highly regarded by US Vice President JD Vance and leading Silicon Valley investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel – refused to answer any follow-up questions after the event, and Byline Times was blocked by two security guards who whisked him away, this newspaper has examined his writings in detail.
“How dangerous is it that we are being linked? One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head.”
A 2014 letter from Peter Thiel to Curtis Yarvin, quoted in the New Yorker
Heredity and Caste
Yarvin’s suggestion that use of the N-word is akin to blasphemy coincides with his assertion – documented across nearly two decades of writing – that the principle that all human populations are innately equal is a liberal ‘superstition’.
This is a core theme of his blog, which originally appeared pseudonymously under the moniker ‘Mencius Moldbug’.
In a 2009 chapter of his Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Yarvin relabelled a belief in human equality as “human neurological uniformity” and divided the world into two camps: “credulists”, clinging blindly to the belief that “genetic differences between races (if the term is even acknowledged) are of no behavioural significance”; and “denialists” who accept that inherited racial group differences or what he calls “patterns of genotype-phenotype correlation in behavioural traits of modern human subpopulations”.
Yarvin reproduced Scottish philosopher David Hume’s claim in a footnote of his 1753 essay Of National Characters that “negroes” are naturally inferior and riffs on it, sneering that to repeat it today merely brands a man a “racist”. More than 250 years ago, the slave-trading abolitionist James Beattie singled it out in Hume’s remarks as an example of prejudice in his 1770 Essay on Truth.
Yarvin also regularly uses the derogatory term “negro” to describe black people, no less than 29 times in one article alone
As to the relevance of these outdated ideas of heredity to modern Americans, Yarvin has resurrected an even more ancient philosophy: the Hindu tradition of reincarnation and caste.
He has written that the US consists of: Brahmins (elite liberal white people in universities, media, and bureaucracy); Vaisyas (the striving white middle-classes); Optimates (the traditional white gentry); Dalits (the black American urban poor); and Helots (an “imported peasant caste” of Central American migrants).
He hard-wired the map into party politics as BDH vs OV: Democrats as Brahmin-Dalit-Helot, Republicans as Optimate-Vaisya. He divided them into “white” and “swarthy” parties.
Further supporting the assertion that this resurrection of caste is political and colour-based, Yarvin has written that he is a “Sailerist” – a follower of Steve Sailer, a far-right blogger and columnist for the white supremacist website VDARE, credited with coining the term ‘human biodiversity’ to popularise scientific racism.
Yarvin also regularly uses the derogatory term “negro” to describe black people, no less than 29 times in one article alone. And claims that life for “the modern American negro” has undergone an ongoing crisis after equal civil rights.
Race and Satire
Having set out his case that equality is a superstition, Yarvin pivoted to governance. In July 2010, he published Race: A Modest Proposal.
Styled after another 18th-century writer, the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, it used the same satirical frame but inverted its purpose.
Where Swift used humour and grotesque irony (cannibalism) to expose the cruelty of the powerful, Yarvin arguably used humour and grotesque irony (a ‘Department of Race’) to make cruelty towards those with little power thinkable.
Yarvin’s Department of Race would force DNA tests to be a “legally binding” part of Census self-identifications: “Forward [the Census forms] to the new Department of Race… A drop of spit snares all remaining snakes.” He then upgraded the logic to outright aristocracy: “Race, of course, is hereditary by definition… Transferable titles of hereditary nobility will end up in the hands of those most capable – a reality confirmed again and again by 21st Century science.”
As he emphasised at How the Light Gets In, Yarvin dislikes ‘affirmative action’ as an inverted form of hereditary privilege. He has cited Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade’s study of 1990s admissions: “America’s bright young people get squat for being Asian, 150 SAT points for being white, 300 for being ‘Hispanic’, and 450 for being black.”
His ironic solution was to turn “race rights” into tradable assets, securitised in trust funds and transferable on a market, so that blackness itself becomes a hereditary title to be bought and sold.
A student is dismissed as a “full-blood chink”. Elsewhere, he imagined a man insisting that “I am of pure white blood, and no damned coolie”.
The satirical mask appears crucial: by presenting his views as parody, Yarvin arguably grants himself deniability while daring his readers to refute him on his own fungible terms.