In recent decades, a computer programmer and productive internet commentary have risen from the ambiguity for forums and pseudonym blogging to the New York Times pages, as a friend of Deputy President JD Vance and as a person who affects many of the people affecting President Donald Trump.

Curtis Yarvin after having moldy Moldbug and building a small but influential subsequent among the more reactionary segments of the technical elite, giving them an elaborate and conspiratorial vision of a nation under the heel of a tyrannical and suffocating liberalism, a wide group of individuals individuals and institutions he calls “the cathedral.” The path to national renewal, says Yarvin, is to reveal US democracy in favor of a rule by a benevolent CEO monarch deducted from a cadre by venture capitalists and corporate sheets.

With opinions like these, it is not difficult to understand how Yarvin won the admiration of powerful protectors. He does a little more than telling them what they want to hear. If he had been born a less noble scream for influence in the court in Louis XIV, he would have been among the first to proclaim the king’s absolute authority, to tell anyone who would listen to yes, the state, it is him.

We do not have kings in the American Republic, but we have capitalists. And in particular, we have a set of capitalists who seem to be as skeptical of liberal democracy as any monarch. They want to hear that they are the indispensable men. They want to hear that their parochial business problems are as important and important as national interest. They are upset by giving and taking democratic life, they want to hear that they are under the siege of the troublesome and illegal forces of enormous conspiracy. And hungry according to the type of status that money can’t buy, they want to hear that they deserve to control. Yarvin confirms her fear, flattering his fantasies and gives them a language to express their great ambitions.

Do not keep in mind that the actual subject in his ideas leaves much to be desired. Take his enlightened interview with The New York Times, where he gives readers a crash course in his overall political vision. He makes a studied effort to look as learned and Erudit as possible. But just linger a little on his answer and you will see to what extent they are under -determined and overbearing.

Think of his claim that “effective government” requires a strong man. He uses consumer goods as evidence:

“When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room made by a monarchy, because these things we call companies are actually small monarchies. You look around and you see, for example, a laptop and the laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. “

If Yarvin thinks Apple is a monarchy, he may not really understand what a monarchy is. Tim Cook is not the superb for the Apple Computing Company; He serves to the pleasure with its board. In addition, to say that the laptop was “manufactured by Apple” is to elide to what extent product development, like all other forms of high level industrial production, is a collective and collaboration process. Your MacBook is not forged by a simple will. The idea that you can “thank the monarchy” for an iPhone is ridiculous, and the idea that this can be a political forecast is absurd.

More unfortunate in the interview are the moments when Yarvin gets basic history wrong in an attempt to show the sophistication of his views. He answers the first question of the exchange – “Why is democracy so bad?” – With what he thinks is a pointed rejoinder:

“You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I make a number sometimes where I only read the last 10 pieces in FDR’s first opening address, where he mainly says, hello, the congress, give me absolute power, otherwise I will take it anyway. So did the FDR actually take that level of power? Yes, he did. “

This is flat untrue. You can read Roosevelt’s first opening address to see for yourself. There is no threat to seize power. “I am prepared under my constitutional obligation to recommend the measures that a beaten nation in the middle of a beaten world may require,” said Roosevelt. “These measures, or other measures that Congress can build up from their experience and wisdom, I will be able to quickly assume within my constitutional authority.”

If Congress does not act, Roosevelt does not say that he will do it himself and arrest absolute power. He says he will ask Congress to give him “broad executive power” to “wage a war against the emergency situation, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were actually invaded by a foreign enemy.” But even this, Roosevelt emphasizes, would be made within the boundaries of the Constitution and in faithfulness to the principles of American democracy.

In fact, one of Roosevelt’s most essential qualities was his belief in the superiority of representative government. It was part of the engine in his ambition and motivated him to try everything under the sun to arrest the crisis for the depression and restore the public’s belief in a system that grew on the edge of collapse and meet pressure from authoritarians at home and abroad. Reading Roosevelt as anything but a small-D Democrat is to show a fundamental ignorance of his life and career.

More laughing than Yarvin’s claims about Roosevelt are his claims about black Americans after slavery. “If you look at the living conditions of an African American in the south, they are definitely on their Nadir between 1865 and 1875,” he says. “They are very bad because this economic system has in principle been disturbed.”

All this comes after his interviewer, My Times colleague David Marchese, shoots Yarvin on his selective use of historical events. It is supposed to be a comeback to Marchese, but it completely fails. The only way it is possible to say that the living conditions for black Americans were worse after emansipation is to ignore the conditions of actual slavery and to treat the human experience as reducing to an estimate of the gross domestic product per capita.

In fact, the material depention of freedom in the post -war south was a small burden compared to Bondage’s tyranny. In freedom, black Americans owned their bodies. They could have families that they chose to look appropriate. They could keep their children. Another way of thinking about this is just asking a series of simple questions: be black Americans better in a world where they are owned as property that would be sold to the highest bidder, and where their sons and daughters were bound and shopped for profit? Do I even need to answer that?

These are some of the daring and unconventional views of a bold iconoclast. And they are nonsense.

The truth is that Yarvin is a log character. Theophrastus identified his type as “The Flatter”, the person “who will say when he goes with another,” Do you observe how people look at you? This happens to no man in Athens but you. “” Plutarch warned their readers by those who “only reflect the image of other people’s feelings and ways and feelings”, of those who “load with praise the ears of those who are fond of praise.” From Shakespeare we have Rean; From Jrr Tolkien, Gríma.

There is no one there – just a subsequent commitment to the powerful interests. Yarvin serves exactly one purpose, and it is to spread the idea that this country would be better served by a dictatorship of capital, the tip of technical elites and their allies in the government.

Vance is a Protégé by Peter Thiel, billionaire Venture Capitalist and occasional allied by Trump. When he sat close to the action at Trump’s inauguration on Monday, the members were in his cabinet. Just in front of them, in full views of the cameras, were Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.

Yarvin is a charlatan, but he has done his job. His patron is in power.

Jamelle Bouie writes a column for the New York Times.