40 Facts About Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement.

In 2002, Yarvin began work on a personal software project that eventually became the Urbit networked computing platform.

Curtis Yarvin has claimed that whites have higher IQs than black people, and opposes US civil rights programs.

Curtis Yarvin has influenced some prominent Silicon Valley investors and Republican politicians, with venture capitalist Peter Thiel described as his "most important connection".

In January 2025, Curtis Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington; Politico reported he was "an informal guest of honor" due to his "outsize[d] influence over the Trumpian right".

Curtis Guy Yarvin was born in 1973 to a liberal, secular family.

Curtis Yarvin's father, Herbert Yarvin, worked for the US government as a diplomat, and his mother was a Protestant from Westchester County.

In 1988, Curtis Yarvin graduated from Wilde Lake High School, a public high school in the planned community of Columbia, Maryland.

Curtis Yarvin attended Brown University from 1988 to 1992, then was a graduate student in a computer science PhD program at UC Berkeley before dropping out after a year and a half to join a tech company.

Curtis Yarvin's pen name, Mencius Moldbug, is a combination of the Confucian philosopher "Mencius" and a play on "goldbug".

In 2002, Curtis Yarvin founded the Urbit computer platform as a decentralized network of personal servers.

In 2016, Curtis Yarvin was invited to present on the functional programming aspects of Urbit at LambdaConf 2016, which resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two sub-conferences, and several sponsors.

Curtis Yarvin left Tlon in January 2019, but retains some intellectual and financial involvement in the development of Urbit.

In 2007, Curtis Yarvin began the blog Unqualified Reservations to promote his political views.

Curtis Yarvin largely stopped updating his blog in 2013, when he began to focus on Urbit; in April 2016, he announced that Unqualified Reservations had "completed its mission".

In 2020, Curtis Yarvin began blogging his views under the page name Gray Mirror, where he speculates on how to achieve a fascist coup in America and replace democracy with a new form of monarchy.

In January 2025, Curtis Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington, DC, hosted by the far-right publishing house Passage Press; Politico reported he was "an informal guest of honor" due to his "outsize[d] influence over the Trumpian right".

Curtis Yarvin believes that real political power in the United States is held by something he calls "the Cathedral", an informal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, which collude to sway public opinion.

Curtis Yarvin argues for a "neo-cameralist" philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia's cameralism.

Curtis Yarvin sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.

Curtis Yarvin is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily anti-progressive.

Under his Moldbug pseudonym, Curtis Yarvin gave a talk about "rebooting" the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference.

Curtis Yarvin used it to advocate the acronym "RAGE", which he defined as "Retire All Government Employees".

Curtis Yarvin described what he felt were flaws in the accepted "World War II mythology", alluding to the idea that Adolf Hitler's invasions were acts of self-defense.

Curtis Yarvin argued these discrepancies were pushed by America's "ruling communists", who invented political correctness as an "extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists".

Curtis Yarvin's ideas have been described by Dylan Matthews of Vox as "neo-monarchist".

Curtis Yarvin's ideas have been influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and the public discourses of prominent investors like Peter Thiel have echoed Curtis Yarvin's project of seceding from the United States to establish tech-CEO dictatorships.

Vice-president JD Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence, saying in 2021, "So there's this guy Curtis Yarvin who has written about these things", which included "Retire All Government Employees" or RAGE, written in 2012.

In 2016, Curtis Yarvin privately asserted to Milo Yiannopoulos that he had been "coaching Thiel" and that he had watched the 2016 US election at Thiel's house.

Curtis Yarvin has been described as part of the alt-right by journalists and commentators.

Curtis Yarvin comes across as a kind of third-rate authoritarian David Foster Wallace, combining post-postmodern bookish eclecticism with a yearning to communicate with and influence young disaffected white men.

Curtis Yarvin's writings are full of dubious historical claims usually mixed with thinly veiled bigotry and a powdery kind of middle-class snobbery.

Curtis Yarvin denied to Vox that he was in contact with Bannon in any way, but he jokingly told The Atlantic that his White House contact was the Twitter user Bronze Age Pervert.

Curtis Yarvin later gave a copy of Bronze Age Pervert's book Bronze Age Mindset to Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the first Trump administration.

Curtis Yarvin has alleged that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons.

Curtis Yarvin has been described as a modern-day supporter of slavery, a description he disputes.

Curtis Yarvin has claimed that some races are more suited to slavery than others.

Curtis Yarvin has described the use of IQ tests to determine superiority as "creepy".

Curtis Yarvin was married to Jennifer Kollmer, who died in 2021 and with whom he had two children.

Curtis Yarvin was briefly engaged to writer Lydia Laurenson, with whom he has one child.