Curtis Yarvin’s name has been popping up a lot lately. In journalist Max Chafkin’s new book The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Yarvin is described as the “house political philosopher” of right-wing billionaire Thiel’s “budding movement.” That label picked up some plausibility when two Thiel-funded Senate candidates, one successful (Ohio’s J. D. Vance) and one not (Arizona’s Blake Masters) expressed admiration for Yarvin on the 2022 campaign trail.

Many people would call Yarvin a “fascist.” Ask him, and he’ll deny it — though not by professing his love for the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, but by pointing out that “autocratic” ideals were common long before the birth of fascism.

However precisely you classify his ideology, Curtis Yarvin is bad news. He’s a racialist crackpot openly contemptuous of democracy, and it’s disturbing to see a billionaire, two politicians, and a prominent cable news host nodding along to Yarvin’s nonsense.