"neoreaction is not a motor vehicle"

It's inauguration weekend in Washington, D.C., and there's a line of black SUVs loitering along 16th Street several blocks away from the White House. I spotted a few stray MAGA-hat-wearing tourists wandering around the mall on Friday as workers set up barricades and bleachers that would soon be pointless decorations. Hours later, Donald Trump announced that he would be moving his swearing in ceremony indoors. Compared to Barack Obama's first inauguration, it's not set to be that cold.

While Trump supporters stood outside in the rain and cold in hopes of obtaining entrance to Trump's victory rally in Capitol One Arena, the rest of the city has boasted an array of celebrations for the incoming wanna-be MAGA elite. There's a Turning Point USA event ("location provided upon registration," allegedly) featuring, somewhat inexplicably, the Village People. Snoop Dogg headlined a gala for crypto enthusiasts. And then there's Passages Press, a lesser-known reactionary publishing outlet, whose head proprietor has been trying to sell a few last-minute tickets for $20,000 — a wild jump from earlier ticket prices, which ranged from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 for VIP.

"Buy 3 of these tickets so we can hire a rw [i.e., rightwing] anon to help us make books," Jonathan Keeperman, who tweets under the handle "L0m3z," wrote on Jan. 15.

"One by one we are going to raise an army," he wrote the next day.

I bring up Passages not to mock Keeperman's pathetic attempts to threaten journalists ("lamppost the journos," Keeperman once tweeted as part of a list of new "ideas" for the Republican Party), though, yes, that too. Rather, Passages is worth highlighting for its ties to the revival of neoreactionary thought, an anti-democracy, anti-egalitarian movement that has found new life — thanks in no small part to the tech elite that sees Trump 2.0 as an opportunity for a cash grab. What Trump's corporate benefactors want to do — namely, ransack the U.S. economy for money and power — is harder to sell to outsiders as being something other than just total economic self-interest without some kind of semblance of ideology. Which is precisely where neoreactionary thought, at least in its current iteration, comes in.

Curtis Yarvin, the godfather of neoreactionary thought, does not understand European history or U.S. executive power, as a recent interview with The New York Times makes clear, but that has done little to stop the right from seeing him as a sort of guru. Since the late aughts, Yarvin — the child of "career federal employees," by his own account — has penned innumerable diatribes against the constellation of liberal institutions oppressing technological advancement and calling to break up the government into a series of fiefdoms. He did so first under a pseudonym, "Mencius Moldbug," and then under his own name. He envisioned a series of "tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries" that would replace "the crappy governments we inherited from history."

"If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move," Yarvin wrote in the same 2008 blog post. His position, since then, has not changed: to upend the status quo meant embracing a strongman and annihilating the tenets of liberal democracy.

While Yarvin started the movement, neoreaction — or NRx, as its proponents sometimes referred to it — took on a life of its own in the 2010s. All NRx adherents supported the core principles of anti-democracy and elitism, though differed with regards to some matters on race and antisemitism. Writing in Social Matter, a now-defunct neoreactionary blog with extensive ties to organized white nationalism, Mark Yuray wrote in 2015:

It is, however, less difficult to enumerate a list of things neoreaction is not. For example, neoreaction is not a motor vehicle. Neoreaction is not a form of government. Neoreaction is not libertarianism. Neoreaction is not [just] monarchism. Neoreaction is not a website. Neoreaction is not a Jewish conspiracy. Neoreaction is, for that matter, not a conspiracy of Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots or lazy conservatives. It is true that some Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots, and lazy conservatives all find a home in neoreaction — as do some Jews. Yet no single group dominates the neoreactionary bubble of thought, so much so that neoreactionaries delineate three separate zones of neoreactionary thought and affiliation, termed the Trichotomy of theonomy, ethnonationalism and techno-commercialism. In other words: faith, blood, and property. God, family, and guns. Everybody’s got a favorite, but nobody maintains less than all three.

Or, as Yuray put it: "Neoreaction is more than just Moldbug — which is why it’s called neoreaction and not Moldbuggianism."

These fissures have lived on. Following a 2020 appearance on a podcast published on the white nationalist podcasting network The Right Stuff, aggrieved commentators berated Yarvin for being insufficiently racist. "Yarvin/Moldbug is nothing but a bag of Jewish tricks," wrote one commentator named "Mr. Skittles." Another suggested shoving him into a locker.

The center of neoreactionary thought has shifted once again. Social Matter and many of the publications it associated with are no more. There are other smaller outlets that sound... very similar and bear some of the same contributors. But neoreaction has a clear winner in who came out as its more "mainstream" friendly face, and it's Yarvin. He's the one gracing the pages of The New York Times or appearing on Tucker Carlson.

To the extent that one form of neoreactionary thought has found mainstream appeal, it is arguably product arguably of years of young rightwingers inundated in reactionary internet milieus growing older and gaining more prominence and power in tech and politics. "The actual ways my ideas get into circulation is mostly through the staffers who swim in this very online soup," Yarvin told the Times. He understates the role that Yarvin's powerful fans, such as Peter Thiel, have had in mainstreaming his thought, but it's still one of the few portions of the interview that is tied to reality.

There's many more words to write about what has made this iteration of neoreactionary thought so successful. One central aspect though, at least for its founder, is its impenetrability. Yarvin, Corey Pein wrote in The Baffler nearly 10 years ago, "reads like an overconfident autodidact’s imitation of a Lewis Lapham essay—if Lewis Lapham were a fascist teenage Dungeon Master." This, as I wrote in 2019, might be an asset. Neoreaction's "central tenets and thinkers, like most internet movements cloaked in onion-like layers of irony, are ambiguous. It feeds off of self-importance, as well as the impossibility of pinning it down." Yarvin, unlike the leaders of political movements that grew up alongside neoreaction like the alt-right, seems content having someone else carry out the political part of his program.

On Saturday evening, J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and dozens of industry flocked to Thiel's Washington, D.C., home to celebrate the incoming president.

"I don't think anyone has ever been looking forward to a Monday like this," Trump Jr. told New York Times journalist Teddy Schleifer. Earlier, Schleifer had tweeted that he spotted just about "every venture capitalist on the tech right" at Thiel's Woodley Park home.

The event marked a profound shift from 2016. Silicon Valley didn't throw its weight behind Trump then – at least not as fully. Former critics, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, have reformed. The CEO of TikTok, an app that Trump and his allies once viciously attacked, is joining him in D.C. After the U.S. temporarily banned the app on Sunday, its millions of users were greeted with a popup reading, in part, "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate Tiktok once he takes office." The company thanked him again in a statement posted on Sunday afternoon after it began the process of restoring service to users.

There's something lost when these decisions are portrayed as industry leaders simply caving to blood-and-soil fascism. Similarly, these shifts can't be reduced to the growing presence of someone like Yarvin. Instead, it seems more that Silicon Valley has drawn upon the most salient kernels of neoreactionary thought that it believes will bolster those its elites have deemed worthy of wealth. Someone like Yarvin provides a sense of mystery to what is essentially a shakedown of the U.S. government that these industry elites see themselves as entitled to.

In a recent op-ed in the Financial Times, Thiel described Trump's return to the White House as an apokalypsis, or "unveiling." It was, in Thiel's telling, "the post peaceful means of resolving the old guard's war on the internet, a war the internet won." Thiel is likely being literal, as John Ganz pointed out at the time, and speaking of neoreaction's dreamed-of "technological singularity." Throughout, Ganz continued of Thiel, "he is not just mystifying but also himself mystified: fetishizing the world of commodities and their production as a religion."

To me, it begs the question: Is the purpose of embracing neoreaction's mystique a means of truly ushering in its adherents' technological utopia? Or just a means of dressing up nihilistic capitalism as something different? And does that distinction even matter anymore?

Maybe it doesn't.