The Accusation in a Mirror of Disruption.

Hi, I'm Chloe Humbert, and I'm recording this on October 23rd, 2024. And I'd like to talk about the tech tycoon guru who reveals the Accusation in a Mirror of conservative pandemic rhetoric. I'm talking about Curtis Yarvin and the true reality behind, you know, all this talk of freedom and railing against disruption or restrictions, etc. etc. If you want to know more about Curtis Yarvin, there have been two podcasts that have covered him very well. The Tech Won't Save Us podcast and the Behind the Bastards podcast have both gone over Curtis Yarvin and how he figures into the right-wing tech tycoon landscape. I recommend those. But for me, I'm looking at... I found out about one of his publications, from back in March 2024 because Julia Black, who was on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, and who wrote a piece in The Information, that references Curtis Yarman's monarchist piece. I would just like to present some excerpts from this piece, the monarchist piece, which I think there's a reveal here of the disingenuous lockdown revisionist rhetoric. He's saving the quiet part out loud. There's some ‘COVID for thee, but not for me’ involved, and definitely some Accusation in a Mirror. And definitely some projection revealed. So the piece was called “A Conversation on Monarchy” on his substack called The Gray Mirror from March 2024. And this is a quote about, you know, revamping the United States government into a monarchy, I suppose. Quote, “Yet the entire transition must remain orderly. Is there a huge difference between life in the public and private sectors? One big company is going out of business, another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot. It is not the 20th century.” Unquote. I seriously suggest that whenever there's opposition to single-payer health insurance in the U.S. and some conservative comes along railing about the jobs that will be lost in private health insurance industries, I suggest saving this quote of Curtis Yarvin. “One big company is going out of business, another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot.” Another quote from his piece is, quote, "At most a week of COVID-style lockdown should be enough to secure the new regime. Not only are the Americans of today, especially the blue state ones, no minute men, but unlike most historical urban populations, they do not even know how to be a mob. Today, civilian numbers are as irrelevant to contests of force as in the 13th century. 21st century Americans are civilized people. We do not chimp.” Unquote. Every accusation is indeed a confession. The idea that the right and conservatives are just against disruption and that protecting people from COVID was just too disruptive to be tolerated - it's clearly simply pure bullshit. Of course, we already knew that. They're all for disrupting the status quo if it serves elite interests. They love disruption. These tech people are always talking about it. But yet, you know, of course, not to save lives. A revolution to thwart any attempt at democratic government oversight of business, or to protect the public safety, though… So here's another quote. “Let’s go through some critical steps in a real 21st-century regime change. Here is what a real “unitary executive” would do if he was a real “dictator on the first day.” Libs: if you are used to squeaking fearfully about far-right conservatives, this very reasonable and if anything mild program will make your prostate gland quiver. And yet, nobody needs to get shot—or even thrown out on the street. While there are many things to say against a government running on a soft currency, the power to print money sure makes it easy to run a regime change. All the civil soldiers of the old regime—and there are a lot of them—can be severed very gently from their positions.” Unquote. The weird part here is, of course, that the right-wing cohorts are actually suggesting live-streamed swatting raids. According to Ivan Raiklin, they'll be carried out by deputized anti-vaxxers at the county level. I don't know who needs to hear this, but typically swatting raids involve guns, and surprise raids with guns usually at least sometimes involve people being shot and dragged away. These operations rarely stay neatly confined when you're dealing with, as Rwandan Jill Rutaremara described in a master's thesis, quote, “The interests and fears of the masses and why they responded to genocide ideology and elite incitement.” Unquote. And this Curtis Yarvin person understands that very well because later in the piece, he says about the American Revolution, quote, “No widespread, systematic execution is a hell of a standard. COVID doesn't put everyone on a ventilator either. So everyone should get COVID?” Unquote. Of course, it's always COVID for thee, but not for me with these elite people. They minimize it, yet acknowledge that forcing everyone to get it is going to lead to bad things. No widespread hospitalization is actually a hell of a standard. They're certainly worried about a little bit of systematic execution when it comes to aristocrats being on the chopping block. Of course. And then comes the woke child credit stuff, and I guess the real reason that J.D. Vance said he supports child tax credits. And also, Curtis Yarvin comes right out and says that schools are daycares for working parents. Quote, “Of course, journalism is just one category of education. While education (and even religion) are long-term responsibilities of government, they are not immediate needs in the same way as, say, nutrition. The exception is their function as daycare—for which we can do what we did during Covid. If you are a caregiver who needs to stay home because schools are closed, you should get your current salary to homeschool—at least until the new schools are spun up.” So yeah, he’s talking about closing public schools - because they’re woke - and spinning up these new schools and paying people to stay home, just like we did in covid. Like the exact thing that all of those people were railing against. These people are not willing to tolerate mitigation measures that might remind people of danger, that might quell interest in shopping in person and are against remote work because it threatens commercial real estate interests. They are against remote schooling or closing schools for COVID outbreaks or even bomb threats. Yes, even bomb threats. My letter to the editor was published in the Scranton Times Tribune in response to a ridiculous yet sinister op-ed that's been published in a dozen other newspapers since being published in my local paper. The op-ed was titled, “Reconsider Automatically Closing School for Prank Threats.” by the editorial board from October 22nd, 2023. Quote, “The emergency text alert of a bomb threat goes out, forcing caregivers to scramble, cutting the school day short and spreading fear among students, parents and educators alike. Multiple schools across Northeast Pennsylvania have been evacuated and/or closed due to threats on five different weekdays since classes resumed in September. On one occasion, those local threats were part of a nationwide scam that targeted 150 U.S. schools. The incidents interfere with students’ progress, inconvenience parents and sow anxiety across the community. And they put school administrators in the unenviable and difficult position of weighing student safety against maintaining normalcy, knowing that these threats are almost certainly bogus, but also knowing that making the wrong call could lead to tragedy.” Unquote. The text of my letter to the editor as it appeared in print newspaper with the Times Tribune. The editors choose the headline and the headline was “School officials must take threats seriously.” So here's my letter: Editor: I had difficulty believing my eyes when I saw the Editorial Board op-ed from Oct 22, 2023, “Reconsider automatically closing schools for prank threats” because this is taking anti-lockdown hysteria way too far. The persistent pandemic era and its “Lockdown” Revisionism and associated but widely debunked “learning loss” myths, should not inform public safety response to threats. We live in times of political turmoil and climate emergencies, and what we need to normalize is dealing with the inevitable disruption, and rise to the moment. Clinging to “maintaining normalcy” as a priority, as if it’s more important than human lives - especially the lives of children, is a morally bankrupt proposition. Normalizing harms is something panicking elites blindly choose over actually having to do the work to mitigate disasters or find solutions to problems. Maybe the people opposing school consolidation back in the 1970s were onto something. All that consolidation means larger more concentrated vulnerabilities for infectious disease, weather events, infrastructure failures, and our endemic gun violence. One thing is certain: the answer to school disruption is NOT accepting the most horrendous potential outcomes as normal. That road ends with children being told to keep filling in circles on their standardized tests while an active shooter roams the halls because “no more lockdowns amirite!” Who will take responsibility when the worst happens because it wasn’t “just a prank” next time? “The Editorial Board” perhaps? I was a little bit surprised they published it, frankly. I've mentioned a few times over the past few years that the No More Lockdowns crowd would never say kids shouldn't have a lockdown at school when there's an active shooter, but now I'm not so sure. I always hear kids are resilient, but apparently they can't even possibly grow up without any disruptions at all. Not even to keep them alive and healthy. This makes no sense. Anxiety is not what's going to kill a kid shot by an active shooter. It's the bullets. and people are not panicking over preventative measures. Plenty of kids the world over throughout history have grown up through far worse disruptions than missing some in-person schooling because of a virus outbreak or a false alarm. The lesson from this spate of threats is that school officials and parents ought to have contingency plans for evacuations and should be coming up with plans and pushing for policies to prevent these threats in the first place. We're living in a time of various upheaval, so yes, sorry, we need to be prepared. The answer isn't pretending it's not happening for the sake of maintaining normalcy at all costs. But in an authoritarian regime change, apparently they would totally bring on the disruption. They already, for a long time, have deployed astroturf activism to serve anti-regulation interests. They don't want oversight by the people. But anti-government doesn't mean anti-governance, because it appears that they want to install full corporate control by elite CEOs exercising power like a boss in the round-the-clock lives of all of us. Another quote from the Curtis Yarvin piece, quote, “Finally, once the new regime has universally demonstrated the incompetence of the old regime, both through historical re-education and by its own vastly superior performance, any remaining interest in reversing the transition will belong to antiquarian cranks. There are still people today who want to restore the Holy Roman Empire or COVID masks or something, whatevs.” unquote. Give me a break, dude. Re-education. Accusation in a mirror. They really are… Re-education. That is what - they want re-education camps. They want to turn public schools, shut them down, and then reopen them as re-education camps. They really believe that education is just about indoctrination because that's what they want. They're not interested in humanity learning and understanding how the world works. They're only interested in manipulating things for their own benefit. They always say you're free because you can quit your job at any time. But can you quit a monopoly? Matt Stoller says no on Ed Zitron's podcast and elsewhere. He said that that's what makes monopolies a form of actual authoritarian governance. It's totalitarianism. What they're suggesting is totalitarianism. If you're wondering where J.D. Vance got his idea that a little monarchy might be good for America... These people are all on the same page. Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance. They possibly see themselves as aristocrats, like those from the 1700s who viewed a possible threat, so-called tyranny from below. Equality and democracy is seen as that by aristocrats. The billionaire cryptocurrency proponent, Balaji Srinivasan, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong - sorry. He was supposed to be the Trump pick to run the FDA back in 2017. Favored by Peter Thiel because, of course, he's anti-regulation and anti-FDA. So Elon Musk isn't the only billionaire who wants a cabinet position. This guy had also claimed back in late 2020 that broken trust in the pandemic that supposedly led to anti-mass sentiments could be solved by the blockchain. You really can't make this stuff up. Gil Duran reported that he said “no blues should be welcomed there”, meaning San Francisco, referring to Democrats. He wants Democrats purged from San Francisco. And on the Tim Ferriss Show interview from 2022, he got details about the Lance Armstrong doping timeline wrong. He even admitted that he was getting things wrong multiple times in that interview. But he references Andrew Huberman positively. That's the scientist influencer from Stanford who has a podcast that promotes unregulated supplements that are unproven and dubious and who was revealed as a serial liar in his personal life and who repeatedly recounted an apparently made up clinical study about sunscreen. He's anti-sunscreen. And this cryptocurrency tycoon, Balaji, says we should view doping in a positive way, saying, quote, "So in the same way, once we flip that moral premise and say optimalism good, enhancement good, then we start shifting it out of Game of Shadows and Soviets and the doping scandals and cheating, all those negative adjectives and we start going to the positive stuff of what Huberman is doing and what David Sinclair is doing. And so on and so forth. The reason I just want to identify this, I actually think that moral language, that moral premise, is everything and it’s often not articulated." Unquote. Yeah, so performance drugs, pseudoscience, re-education, and a tycoon-run monarchy corporate government. What could possibly go wrong? Apparently, the revolution will be gaslit.