“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.

He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”

He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.

“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”

He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.

If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”

At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.

People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.

I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.

Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.

They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.

“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.

I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.

A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.

I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.

He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.

I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.

It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.

He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.

But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.

That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.

Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.

“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.

Murphy chortled knowingly.

“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.

“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

He said he thought this was pessimistic.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.

We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”

I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:

Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,

replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

On the last afternoon of NatCon,
a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address,
Vance showed up.

He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello.

“I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.

I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry.

He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin,
and asked me to explain his philosophy.

I found myself at a loss.
I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”

“A monarchist?”he asked.

He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.

Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie,
looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation.

He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.

I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”

What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.”

People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972.

Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people;

he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments.

The speech was later linked in alarmed
op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning.

But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering.

Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual.

Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.

But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural,
self-serving, and
financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil.

And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.

I asked Masters whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist
techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear.

He said yes.

I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances.

“That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”

“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block, and I’ve got two minutes to talk about #Kyle #Rittenhouse,” he’d said earlier,

talking about his spots on Fox News.

“And it’s like, ‘Well, the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have been on trial,
and they’re punishing him for being a white guy who defended himself with an AR-15.’ ”

Conservative media seems to thrive on culture-war touch points as much as all the rest of it.

“I feel like I’m willing to go there,” he said.

“But you can’t do that on Laura Ingraham sound bites.”

He was a little less rosy about the future with some interviewers than he was with me.

“We need someone with their hand on the tiller who understands where we’ve been and where we need to go,” he told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently.

“Otherwise we will get just totally owned by the progressive left.

And the progressive left just remains the enemy.

It’s the enemy of true progress. It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”

I asked if he could give me a vision of what he thought victory for his side would look like.

“It’s just families and meaningful work,” he said,
“so that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.”

Pretty much anyone could agree with this. And pretty much anyone could wonder how it is that this sort of thing has come to seem radical,
or distant from the lives of many people growing into adulthood today.

“It just feels so networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.”

“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
Masters said to me.

“It’s a tangible enemy
—if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it.
And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said.

“But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”

I asked him about the term
Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters
and cool-kid cultural figures
as a sort of cultural vanguard.

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,”
he told me,
“or if anyone actually does anything.”

“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks.

“I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”

“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”

He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.

“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”

I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel.

“Maybe, yeah,” he said.

“We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy,
both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place.

“I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said.

“And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.”

Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the #Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future,”
which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.

But to Masters, #Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world
and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives.

A few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters,
a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old.

I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign,
and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News,

including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink.

“Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked.

“These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson.

“You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ”

He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy
—so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there.

“That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.

At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area,
Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform:

on-shoring industrial production,
slashing legal immigration,
regulating big tech companies,
and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on.

I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these.

“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.

“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said.
It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was.

“I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”

He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”

Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres.

He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics.

But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years
is a hopeless dead end.

“A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet
IM—1776
recently.

“You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture.

And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”

“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me.

“I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”

He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance,

although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right.

Milius was a sardonic and constant presence,
easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice.

She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there,
favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses.

She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius,
who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn.

She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan,

so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil.

She thought something had radically changed since 2015,

after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood,

before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada,

eventually landing a job in his State Department.

“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement.

So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism.

Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”

She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it,
was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream.

“I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place

where the left used to be at.”

What she meant specifically:

“The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.”

This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues
—or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues,
one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it,
that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life.

But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts.

Milius brought up "Red Scare",
a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction
—she’d actually cast one of the hosts, #Dasha #Nekrasova, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.

Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America
—that history was headed in the wrong direction.

“Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” Laurenson said,
just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others.

“They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’ ”

People at the conference seemed excited about being in a place where they weren’t alone.

I skipped most of the talks
—which ranged from sessions about confronting the threat of China
to the liberal influence on pop culture
to “Worker Power.”

Hawley gave a keynote on the “assault on the masculine virtues,”

and Cruz offered up a traditional stump speech, evoking Reagan and saying he thought conservatives would soon prevail at the ballot box.

“I’m pretty sure a lot of the 20-somethings rolled their eyes at that,” Yarvin said to me afterward with a smirk.

The 20-somethings had a bigger vision.

Up by the bar every night, hordes of young men, mostly, would descend to drink and bear-hug and spot favorite podcasters and writers.

You could see #Dave #Rubin, and #Jack #Murphy, who hosts a popular New Right–ish YouTube channel
and is trying to build a fraternal group of men who believe in
“positive masculinity”
that he calls the "Liminal Order. "

Pretty much everyone had the same trimmed beard and haircut
—sides buzzed short, the top longer and combed with a bit of gel to one side.

I didn’t see a single Black person under the age of 50,

though there were attendees of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent.

In March, the journalist #Jeff #Sharlet
(a Vanity Fair contributing editor who covers the American right)
tweeted that the
“intellectual New Right is a white supremacist project designed to cultivate non-white support,”

and he linked it to resurgent nationalist and authoritarian politics around the world:

“It’s part of a global fascist movement not limited to the anti-blackness of the U.S. & Europe.”

Yet many on the New Right seem increasingly unfazed by accusations that they’re white nationalists or racists.

Masters in particular seems willing to goad commentators,
believing that the ensuing arguments will redound to his political advantage:

“Good luck [hitting] me with that,”
Masters told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently,
arguing that accusations of racism had become a political bludgeon used to keep conservative ideas outside the political mainstream.

“Good luck criticizing me for saying critical race theory is anti-white.”

But for all the chatter of looming dystopia, no one I spoke to raised one of the most dystopian aspects of American life:
our vast apparatus of prisons and policing.

Most people seemed more caught up in fighting what they perceived as the cant and groupthink among other members of the political media class,

or the hypocrisy of rich white liberals who put up Black Lives Matter signs in front of multimillion-dollar homes,

than they were with the raw experience that has given shape to America’s current racial politics.

By the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013,

he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite.

In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”

The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like #Thiel and #Balaji #Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of #Coinbase,

and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to
“seize key positions of authority and power”
and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,”
just as the #Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism,
a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.

In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and #Milo #Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.

“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote.

“Just plays it very carefully.”

Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower.

He and Thiel worked,
generally without success,
to install figures like Srinivasan,
whom they proposed to head the FDA,
and who himself often talked about the
“paper belt,”
in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept,

and made common cause with figures like #Steve #Bannon, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state,
an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal.

Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area,
moving with his wife and two children to Nevada.

His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated,

publishing searching poems about her.

But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call,
inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it,

and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,”

to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.

“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me.

“So I answered this email and I was just like,
‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”

The two are now engaged.

Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic
and the protests of the summer of 2020.

“I started really getting drawn to #NRx ideas,” she said,
using a common online abbreviation for the
neo-reactionary fringe,

“because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I have a background in social justice,” she said.

But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”

She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating,
discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years.

“I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me.

They just never told anyone about it,” she said.

“It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”

"No one directs this system,
and hardly anyone who participates in it believes that it’s a system at all.

Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories
and honestly describe political upheaval.

But within "the Cathedral", the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order,

which includes nationalists,
antigovernment types,
or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts
on issues like vaccine mandates,
in as alarming a way as I possibly can.

This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and has been sent into hyperdrive by Twitter and Facebook,

because the stuff that compels people to click on articles or share clips of a professor
tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten them, or both at the same time.

The more attention you gain in the Cathedral system, the more you can influence opinion and government policy.

Journalists and academics and thinkers of any kind now live in a desperate race for attention
—and in Yarvin’s view,
this is all really a never-ending bid for influence,
serving the interests of our oligarchical regime.

So I may think I write for a living. But to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a weird combination of intelligence-gathering and propagandizing.

Which is why no one I was talking to at NatCon really thought it would be possible for me to write a fair piece about them.

You won’t hear people use the "Cathedral" term a lot in public,
although right-wing Twitter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show last September.

People who’ve opened their eyes to this system of control have taken the red pill,
a term Yarvin started using back in 2007,
long before it got watered down to generally mean supporting Trump.

To truly be red-pilled, you have to understand the workings of the Cathedral.

And the way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued,
is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy

and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up.

As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym #RAGE
—Retire All Government Employees
—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.”

What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a
“national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

Yarvin now shies away from the word "dictator" and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of #authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare:

“If you’re going to have a #monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.

As Moldbug,
Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences,
and in an early post, titled
“Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,”
he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing.

He told me he’d pursued those early writings in a spirit of “open inquiry,”
though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists.

Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed,
like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik
—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp
—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong

but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called
Norway’s “communist” government.

He argued that Nelson Mandela,
once head of the military wing of the African National Congress,
had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents,
and said anyone who claimed
“St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have
“a mother you’d like to fuck.”

He’s tempered himself in middle age
—he now says he has a rule never to
“say anything unnecessarily controversial,
or go out of my way to be provocative for no reason.”

Many liberals who hear him talk would probably question how strictly he follows this rule,

but even in his Moldbug days, most of his controversial writings were couched in thickets of irony and metaphor,

a mode of speech that younger podcasters and Twitter personalities on the highly online right have adopted
—a way to avoid getting kicked off tech platforms or having their words quoted by liberal journalists.

He considers himself a reactionary, not just a conservative
—he thinks it is impossible for an Ivy League–educated person to really be a conservative.

He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory,

because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academia
—an intertwined nexus he calls
“the Cathedral.”

He developed a theory to explain the fact that America has lost its so-called state capacity,
his explanation for why it so often seems that it is not actually capable of governing anymore:

The power of the executive branch has slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the educated
who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about America’s national interest.

We spoke sharing a bench outside in the dark one evening,
a few days into the NatCon conference.

#Yarvin is friendly and solicitous in person,
despite the fact that he tends to think and talk so fast that he can start unspooling,

reworking baroque metaphors to explain ideas to listeners who have heard them many times before.

Strange things can happen when you meet him.

I’d gotten in touch with him through a mutual friend,
a journalist I knew from New York who once had a big magazine assignment to write about him.

The piece never came out.

“They wanted him to say I was really evil and all that,” Yarvin told me.

“He wouldn’t do it and pulled the piece. And I thought, Okay, that’s a cool guy.”

This friend has now made a bunch of money in #crypto,
works on a project Yarvin helped launch to build a #decentralized #internet,
and lives hours out into the desert in Utah, where he’ll occasionally call in to New Right–ish podcasts.

He recently had dinner with Thiel and Masters
—both Masters and Vance have raised money by offering donors a chance to dine with Thiel and the candidate.

Yarvin has a pretty condescending view of the mainstream media:

“They’re just predators,” he has said,
who have to make a living attacking people like him.

“They just need to eat.”

He doesn’t usually deal with mainstream magazines
and wrote that he’d been “ambushed” at the last NatCon, in 2019, by a reporter for Harper’s
—where I also write
—who made him out to be a bit of a loon
and predicted that the NatCons’ populist program would soon be
“stripped of its parts”
by the corporate-minded Republican establishment.

But the winds are shifting.
He told me about how he’d gone to read poetry in New York recently,
at the Thiel-funded NPC fest.

“A bunch of lit kids showed up,” he said, grinning.

I had grown into adulthood in the New York lit-kid world;
even a few years ago, there was no question that anything like this could have happened.

But now Yarvin is a cult hero to many in the ultrahip crowd that you’ll often hear referred to as the “downtown scene.”

“I don’t even think
bothered showing up,” Yarvin said.

“What would they do? It was an art party.”

Yarvin had asked his new girlfriend,
#Lydia #Laurenson,
a 37-year-old founder of a progressive magazine, to vet me.

The radical right turn her life had taken created complications.

“One of my housemates was like
—‘I don’t know if I want Curtis in our house,’ ” she told me.

“And I’m like, ‘Okay, that makes sense. I understand why you’re saying that.’ ”

Laurenson had been a well-known blogger and activist in the #BDSM scene back when Yarvin was the central early figure in a world of “neo-reactionary” writers,

publishing his poetry and political theory on the Blogger site under the name #Mencius #Moldbug.