"I'm reading this crazy article in The New Yorker...."

I wrote, in June 2025. 

I can't believe I need to take this guy seriously enough to worry about him, but The New Yorker wants me to feel that I do. ... I see I've written about Yarvin before. Did I take him seriously or was he even funnier last time?... The one old post... is about a NYT interview with him. So his visibility to me has solely been a consequence of elite liberal media telling me to worry about him.... It was liberal media asserting that he's important to conservatives. Is he?!

This morning, I'm seeing that "crazy article" won an award: "The New Yorker’s Ava Kofman Wins a 2026 National Magazine Award/The prize, for a Profile of the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin...."

To report the winning Profile, Kofman delved deeply into the writings of Yarvin, who popularized the concept of being “red-pilled”—a riff on a scene in “The Matrix”—and turned it into a rallying cry among conservatives. A former tech designer, Yarvin has advocated for “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and called for the establishment of an American monarchy, arguing in 2011 that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to reign as king....

I still can't believe I need to take this guy seriously enough to worry about him, so please nudge me if I'm languishing in blissful complacency.

"... Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a 'patchwork' of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler."

"The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—'a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?'—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

I'm reading this crazy article in The New Yorker, "Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America/The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee" by Ava Kofman.

I can't believe I need to take this guy seriously enough to worry about him, but The New Yorker wants me to feel that I do. The part about the pilots cracked me up. It's a joke, right?!

Adding tags to this post, I see I've written about Yarvin before. Did I take him seriously or was he even funnier last time? I'll publish this post, click on the tag, then update.

ADDED: The one old post — here, last January — is about a NYT interview with him. So his visibility to me has solely been a consequence of elite liberal media telling me to worry about him. The NYT interview is "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening." But it wasn't the conservatives who elevated him to the point where I noticed him. It was liberal media asserting that he's important to conservatives. Is he?! 

I'm reading and listening to "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening."

This is an interview in the NYT (free access link to the edited transcript/I listened to the full audio in the NYT audio app). Here's an excerpt. The boldface is the interviewer David Marchese:

You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.

Do you think it’s better that women got the vote? I don’t believe in voting at all.

Do you vote? No. Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. “What does this power mean to you?” is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don’t have one.