An Audience with Yarvin

A sunny gathering of dark elves...?

Rockefeller Park at Battery Park City, a pleasant July Saturday. Yachts pass by in the Hudson like an alpine lake cradled between the steep jagged skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan and Jersey City. Dozens of oxford shirt former college republican disciples surround the master, a guru from out west. His hair goes just past his shoulders over his loose half button shirt, saffron like the robes of Theravada monks. Only the few closest to him can hear his wisdom. He talks at length about Garibaldi. A bro in a Mets jersey asks, “Who is the most overrated monarch in history?” The guru says something about Queen Victoria. A helicopter flies over noisily and the guru turns to silently acknowledge it, as if to say “Yes, I know you feds are watching me.” This is my first IRL encounter with the infamous neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin.

“It feels more perverse to meet in the daytime for this sort of thing, rather than in some den of iniquity,” Nick Burns tells me, referring to the Mars Review of Books party during NYC Urbit week in May. Here, the colors are more pronounced, the faces more exposed in the sun. Our Mexican friend Pablo is here, too, but the scene is not so Gatsbyesque as before, when he and Nick argued about American literature surrounded by people doing key bumps of cocaine. Just a humble cooler of Modelos and iced tea next to a table of fruit, chips, and sandwiches—and the sign, “Gray Mirror,” the title of Curtis Yarvin’s Substack. Most of the people in this crowd are supposedly its paying subscribers in the tri-state area, although some drove several hours to come to this—and others, like Nick and I, are infiltrators who managed to get the address without subscribing. There are some familiar DC Café-Milano–scene politico types that just so happened to be in town when they heard about the event. Other than that, it’s mostly tech and adjacent characters—the east coast sort, which I’m told is quite different from the west coast sort. (I’m planning a California SF Bay Area/Los Angeles trip sometime soon to explore this further.)

But unlike with Urbit week, Dimes Square didn’t seem to get the memo—all those Warhol factory girls and Bush-era leftover literary critics and blackpilled creative directors are nowhere to be found. There aren’t even any of the Milady NFT people, or at least none of them I recognize. The scene is more pastel than Realtree. What you get is the behind-the-scenes powerbuilding of fascism (congealing in broad daylight) without the lubricating frippery and ostentation of failed artists that’s necessary for a fascist intellectual-libidinal climate to really flourish. Or, as Yarvin himself calls the necessary ingredient, “the cool kids.”

So the crowd is almost entirely male, aside from a few women who seem to be girlfriends of guys there and this one girl I notice right in the center of the Yarvin’s lecture circle. She is thin and unusually attractive, and from her facial expressions she looked like she was wrestling with the weight of Yarvin’s ideas, so I just assumed she was a Dimes Square type looking for inspiration to create some bad Nazi art. But it turns out that once Yarvin’s discourse ended and the big circle broke apart, a bunch of the guys accosted her for her normie lib politics, and she was asking them if they really believed any of this bullshit. She was from Russia and worked for the United Nations or something, so you can probably imagine how these boys reacted to that. Maybe they suspected she had something to do with that black helicopter that flew by. I don’t actually witness this encounter—I hear about it from a new acquaintance who is interested in Yarvin’s writing for reasons that are too complicated to explain here and who came to this meetup because he expected to see more of the downtown art people. “They were all surrounding her, like it was cringe and incel,” he tells me, “why can’t these people just have good aesthetics?” I tell him that I don’t really think it’s a problem of aesthetics, and that this is definitely going in the Substack. But I still found his hope that there would be more glamorous people at the meetup to be relatable.

Nick and I also meet a friendly LES punk oldhead who works as a personal trainer and tells us about the time he had been estranged from some old friends after he told them in 2015 that he supported Trump (though he says he never voted for him). He says he now wishes that Trump would’ve been a Caesar rather than a Gracchus.

***

Two days after the event Yarvin made a fascinating post on the Gray Mirror Substack entitled “You can only lose the culture war,” where he talks about the culture war in terms of Lord of the Rings races. But instead of using the obvious good-versus-evil racial metaphor of the free people of Middle Earth against Sauron’s hordes of orcs and whatever, it’s posed in terms of “hobbits” versus “elves.” The hobbits are analogous to salt-of-the-earth red-state Americans, but they are also philistines who are incapable of governing themselves. “Hobbits just want to grill,” he writes. They cannot win the culture war against the elves, who are a higher race that is more sophisticated and capable of governance. Even if the hobbits take power, there is no way they could keep it. “The hobbits can only win by taking power from one group of elves, then giving it to another group of elves. Let’s call these groups the high elves and the dark elves. These dark elves are the allies hobbits need to get the quality of government they deserve.”

Yarvin himself is an “elf,” and I suppose that would mean I am one too because we both come from a similar DC-area deep state background that makes us capable of ruling the lesser races. But I’d be a “high elf” because I’m woke and leftist and most everyone else at the meetup would be “dark elves” of various shades. Or maybe Yarvin is disgusted by his fans and thinks they’re all hobbits, they aren’t chad enough to seduce that one Russian high elf there with the effortless swagger and nonchalance befitting a higher race. They don’t have his own charisma, which I noticed was quite palpable despite his obvious nerdiness. How could they possibly rule a thousand-year Reich? The answer is literally to win over the Dimes Square people, who are the real dark elves.

As a dissident, winning the culture war means establishing cultural dominance, which means becoming fashionable. Culture is still downstream from power, but your hobbit coup will go way better if you have a beefy fifth column within the elf ruling class—and a hidden cadre of dark elves who can emerge to rule the future.

To make dissident ideas more fashionable, it is not necessary to “water them down.” Just the opposite—it is necessary to make them more daring, more frightening and beautiful, more audacious and transgressive, more surprising and delightful. The strategy of the dark elf is to seduce the ruling high elves into losing faith in their own prestigious institutions—by showing them something that attracts them more—by painting a picture of an amazing and totally different future as a work of art.

Fashionable transgression, not bombs or bullets or even laws, is offense in the culture war…

There you have it. Although this all sounds pretty ridiculous, I’m sure it’s going to immediately infect the personal vocabulary of how I describe my adventures in the downtown world. A civil war of elves. Brooklyn is the realm of high elves, Dimes Square the citadel of dark elves. I’ll be asking people at parties what type of elf they are. But in any case, if you really want the dark elves who wear Praying and whatnot to come out to the party, you should probably do the event at night.