Far-right guru Curtis Yarvin's long history of public statements reveals the heart of at least the techno-faction of TrumpCo, exemplified by the adolescent yearning for a daddy figure, for "A Man on A White Horse," a John Wayne figure, a manly monarch who could slash through the Gordian Knot, who could rid us once and for all of the messiness inherent to a multi-cultural democracy.
Like Ayn Rand, Yarvin's power stems from convincing immature men, in this case the core members of the Paypal Mafia, that their baser impulses—their greed, say, or their selfishness, or arrogance--all things egregiously common in young men—are not base at all, but something to cultivate, to build upon.
Most young men grow up, we'd like to think, accumulating wisdom, recognizing and discarding their infantile narcissism as they mature. But wealth accumulated at a very young age, like celebrity or drug addiction, can stop the process of maturation.
These types of wanton and immature and nearly exclusively male personalities, common in the Silicon Valley elite, are inherently attracted to the black and white simplicity of fascism. And for some of these techno-elitists, this black or white simplicity extends to a pure and distilled racism.
Four of the PayPal Mafia, Peter Thiel, David O. Sacks, Roelof Botha, and Elon Musk all spent their pivotal childhood years in South Africa during apartheid. Musk's family moved to South Africa specifically because of their white supremacist beliefs. His maternal grandfather was a member of the Canadian Nazi Party and espoused white supremacy and Christian nationalism. We've gotten to know Mr. Musk pretty well recently. But who are these other guys? I looked them up, and among other things found an excellent introduction to them. Chris McGreal, the Johannesburg correspondent for the Guardian has been studying this group for some time and I'm going to start quoting him:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
I REALLY RECOMMEND YOU READ THIS PIECE.
Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. As a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound.”
David O. Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young.
Roelof Botha A less outspoken member, though a large contributor to far-right causes. Hes grandfather, the patriarch of his family was a leading official in the unabashedly Nazi-aligned and Christian white supremacist National Party of South Africa.
South Africa was led by a National Party prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia, The Ossewabrandwag (OB)three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
The OB was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler.
Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism.
“We stand for Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,” he said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called ‘Fascism’, in Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa ‘Christian nationalism’.”
At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the government as minister of justice and five years later became prime minister.
Nazism may have been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the “swart gevaar”, or black danger, at bay.
In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs. ENDQUOTE
But back to Yarvin.
Yarvin, an aging enfant terrible who is usually seen wearing a biker jacket, uses libertarian Gordian Knot-cutting stoner dream language to argue that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with an oligarch-supported monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up.
We all know guys like this--the "edgelord libertarian," the stoner philosopher, the guy who skims fancy books to pose as an "Oxfordian intellectual," in this case not the university but rather the group of conspiracy theorists who believe that Shakespeare's works were actually written by Edward de Vere, Duke of Oxford, ignoring that a dozen of Shakespeare's plays were written after De Vere's death.
We all know guys like this, but this one is whispering in the ear of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance, and they are whispering in the ear of Donald Trump. And that is a problem.
