30 Facts About Curtis Yarvin

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

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

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

Curtis Yarvin spent part of his childhood abroad, mainly in Cyprus.

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

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.

Curtis Yarvin's reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed marked Curtis Yarvin's first break with democracy.

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

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".

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

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 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 US to establish tech-CEO dictatorships.

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'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, though 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 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".