A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America
Yarvin wants to destroy democracy. J. D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are among his fans.
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 | June 2, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”
Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.
If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.
In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “
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That Book About Biden’s Decline
By Jim Newell | June 03, 2025 11:37 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/joe-biden-original-sin-dem
ocrats-2024-election.html
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet was at the event. He’d never felt as if the White House had a coherent policy. “It seemed like there were two competing sides of the debate within the administration … but no one had publicly articulated the president’s view on the matter.” Bennet “had come to believe that Biden’s inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue. . . .
As the presidency went on, decisions that would once have been two weeks late started coming months late, if they arrived at all. It took until June of a presidential election year for Biden to recognize the festering political wound of his immigration policy and take executive action to stanch the flow at the border. The administration’s plans for resolving the Israel–Hamas war were clear to no one, and pleased no one. Even on the issue nearest to his heart—the defense of Ukraine—the administration was trapped between a growing GOP base that wanted to drop involvement altogether and Ukraine supporters of all persuasions who felt the administration was taking it too cautiously. And the defining decision of them all—to drop out of the race due to loss of confidence from the American public—came a year and a half too late.
There have been endless debates since the election about whether it was Biden’s decline or Biden’s governing missteps that did Democrats in. The short answer is that it was both.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Notes from an Occupation
America is an occupied country, ruled by partisans hostile to democracy.
By Marilynne Robinson | June 26, 2025 issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilynne_Robinson
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/06/26/notes-from-an-occupation-m
arilynne-robinson/
A well-planned occupation seizes the heights of the defeated civilization, so that the people will see their leaders ousted or humiliated and made docile. It will likewise discredit and weaken those features of the culture in which its people placed confidence and pride. If this model were applied to our situation, we might expect to see the Supreme Court diminished, the Congress disempowered, and the Constitution desacralized by indifference or contempt. The press would come under attack. Our incomparable universities and research institutions would lose autonomy and resources. The mighty dollar would be weakened. Bonds with allies would be breached, and the occupied country would be held in contempt for the damage its default had done to the world order, and to democracy, having put aside its responsibility for demonstrating the viability of popular government.
Examples of the seizing of cultural heights abound. In 70 AD the Romans utterly razed the Temple at Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself in order to deal with the Jewish population’s resistance to their oppression. In 1814 the British, still wanting to break the back of the Revolution, burned the American Capitol Building, destroying the Library of Congress. Someone among the insurrectionists of 2021 might have read a book on imperialism and realized how easily the same results could be achieved if the occupiers were not an alien force, but merely partisans hostile to what the idea of democracy had made of the country over the decades and centuries of its flourishing.
Historically, in America, two contending factions have had enough in common with each other to maintain a basic coherency in government. Then in the late twentieth century their differences became inflamed. The competition became both brutal and unserious. On the right, real interest in the general welfare became secondary to a crusade bent on unconditional and permanent victory. An entanglement with something resembling religion gave it claims to a special righteousness that owed nothing to fact or reason or to the conventions of civilized politics.
Homegrown insurrectionists would have special knowledge of a culture’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities. They would know how to induce corrosive shame, for example. They might have resentments specific to the culture’s measures of status and accomplishment, which would add piquancy to the neutering of centers of influence. None of this is normal, though it has consolidated itself under cover of the customary transfer of power. It claims a mandate to transform the country fundamentally, to return it to its competitors, if there should be another election, irreversibly changed and damaged.
I am proposing, of course, that America actually is, at present, an occupied country. I will call the occupiers Red and the occupied Blue, since these colors are in general use for distinctions of this kind and seemingly cause no offense. To the extent that this statement is complicated by the fact that those in power were elected, their conduct in office seems not to be what many of their voters were led to expect or would have chosen. So the polls tell us. Elections do indeed have consequences, and should have them. The sovereignty of the people must be honored even as they begin to repent of their choices. This is among the many crucial norms that depend altogether on respect. It cannot mean only that the electorate must be deferred to, even when it is misinformed or aroused to unhealthy excitements.
Democracy cannot decline far without ceasing to be democracy. The spirit of its politics might well become so degraded that the people, whose authority can have no legitimate successor, are ousted altogether. We can see who would displace them—the ultra-rich, the tech vis
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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What’s behind Trump’s assault on Harvard and crown-jewel US universities?
Decades-long suspicion of elite universities has evolved under President Trump into a full-scale war against institutions deemed to have grown overtly political – punctuated this week by curbs on the flow of international students to Harvard.
By Simon Montlake | June 05, 2025, 1:22 p.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2025/0605/trump-universities-ha
rvard-international-students
The escalating battle between President Donald Trump and Harvard University is a high-stakes cultural and political standoff that echoes far beyond higher education. Public deference toward the scholarly excellence that Harvard represents has been eroded by a backlash against elite universities now seen by many voters as bastions of political liberalism. This growing resentment, mostly on the political right, has fueled an assault on their exalted status.
It’s a battle that has been years in the making: Conservatives have long seethed at the ideological tilt on most college campuses and accused administrators of stifling free speech. But it took the reelection of Mr. Trump, a businessman who started his own failed eponymous university and is finely attuned to status and slights, to light the fuse.
New actions this week expand what amounts to a multipronged assault on elite universities. On Wednesday, the Department of Education asked for a review of Columbia University’s accreditation status, citing antisemitism on its campus. That evening, President Trump issued a proclamation suspending visas for new foreign students at Harvard for national security reasons.
Asked recently in the Oval Office about the dispute with Harvard, Mr. Trump blamed the university for being defiant. “Harvard has got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.”
The Trump administration has already slashed federal funding of scientific and medical research, of which Harvard is a major recipient. In February it began investigating 10 universities – all in Democrat-run states – accused of failing to protect Jewish students during a wave of campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. Columbia bowed under pressure; other universities sought to reach agreements to unlock federal funds. But Harvard balked at the maximalist demands of the White House.
Now it finds itself squeezed from all sides. In addition to the billions of dollars in frozen grants and federal contracts, and the administration’s repeated efforts to block the enrollment of international students – Wednesday’s proclamation came after an earlier effort was halted by a federal judge – Mr. Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, which would impact donations. The spending bill passed recently by Republicans in the House of Representatives would hike the 1.4% tax on Harvard’s $53 billion endowment to 21%, adding to the financial and political pressure on the university.
The Trump administration argues that universities including Harvard have done too little to address rising antisemitism.
“If you want to make an example and to demonstrate your power, how better to do it than to go after the university that’s at the top of the heap?” asks Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, who now teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “It sends a chilling message.”
A dispute years in the making
As far back as 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr. penned his book “God and Man at Yale,” colleges were catching conservative criticism for diverging from traditional values. But the relationship between GOP leaders and elite universities grew far more hostile during the past decade, as universities became more explicitly political in their messaging – often in direct opposition to Mr. Trump and his movement.
In 2019, Mr. Trump signed an executive order th
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Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.
You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.
You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...
T
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Where Is Barack Obama?
The “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.
By Mark Leibovich | June 8, 2025, 8 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/obama-retirement-
trump-era/683068/
Last month, while Donald Trump was in the Middle East being gifted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, Barack Obama headed off on his own foreign excursion: a trip to Norway, in a much smaller and more tasteful jet, to visit the summer estate of his old friend King Harald V. Together, they would savor the genteel glories of Bygdøyveien in May. They chewed over global affairs and the freshest local salmon, which had been smoked on the premises and seasoned with herbs from the royal garden.
Trump has begun his second term with a continuous spree of democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action. And Obama, true to form, has remained carefully above it all. He picks his spots, which seldom involve Trump. In March, he celebrated the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and posted his annual NCAA basketball brackets. In April, he sent out an Easter message and mourned the death of the pope. In May, he welcomed His Holiness Pope Leo XIV (“a fellow Chicagoan”) and sent prayers to Joe Biden following his prostate-cancer diagnosis.
No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication. His “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.
Obama occasionally dips into politics with brief and unmemorable statements, or sporadic fundraising emails (subject: “Barack Obama wants to meet you. Yes you.”). He praised his law-school alma mater, Harvard, for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt” by the White House “to stifle academic freedom.” He criticized a Republican bill that would threaten health care for millions. He touted a liberal judge who was running for a crucial seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. When called upon, he can still deliver a top-notch campaign spiel, donor pitch, convention speech, or eulogy.
Beyond that, Obama pops in with summer and year-end book, music, and film recommendations. He recently highlighted a few articles about AI and retweeted a promotional spot for Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds, a new Netflix documentary from his and Michelle’s production company. (Michelle also has a fashion book coming out later this year: “a celebration of confidence, identity, and authenticity,” she calls it.) Apparently, Barack is a devoted listener of The Ringer’s Bill Simmons Podcast, or so he told Jimmy Kimmel over dinner.
In normal times, no one would deny Obama these diversions. He performed the world’s most stressful job for eight years, served his country, made his history, and deserved to kick back and do the usual ex-president things: start a foundation, build a library, make unspeakable amounts of money.
But the inevitable Trump-era counterpoint is that these are not normal times. And Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified.
“There are many grandmas and Rachel Maddow viewers who have been more vocal in this moment than Barack Obama has,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “It is heartbreaking,” he added, “to see him sacrificing that megaphone when nobody else quite has it.”
People who have worked with Obama since he left office say that he is extremely judicious about when he weighs in. “We try to preserve his voice so that when he does speak, it has impact,” Eric Schultz, a close adviser to Obama in his post-presidency, told me. “There is a dilution factor th
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.
You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.
You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...
T
I'm not anti-education. I'm anti-indoctrination.
I bought my house with cash when I was 32 years old and haven't held a single cent of debt since I was 25 years old. Virtually retired now for going on 15 years.
Don't talk to me about "success", mutt. You keep living your sad little life alone in that shitty little apartment because you spent your entire adult life buying shit you didn't need and paying interest and high taxes just to be able to keep paying those bills. Meanwhile you have no family or friends that care a lick about you and your time on earth has almost run out.
Your life sucked. Your life continues to suck. And when you're gone there will be nobody there to mourn you because your dead whore of a mother is already dead and everyone else you ever knew hates being around you.
You are a complete failure.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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