5 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What drives me nuts about this is that this isn't new, it was just ignored. The left has been warning about people like Yarvin, their fascist goals, and how they were getting the backing of powerful people like Peter Thiel to spread their influence. (The podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here, for example, have done great work about it, and i highly recommend them both. ) And over the years, almost all I saw as a response from liberals/centrists was either "they're too crazy to get anywhere" at best, or more typically, that the left was engaging in panicky fearmongering and to shut up and stop being so extreme before they scared away swing voters.
Now we are, with an incoming administration filled to the brim with true believers in this fascist nonsense, backed by billionaires who not only believe it too but who helped spread that ideology and promote those true believers. We may well have just lost our democracy, and it's not as if nobody saw it coming.
I'm not saying this to pick fights or play the blame game, since we're all going to need to band together to fight what's coming. It's just incredibly disheartening and frustrating having watched warnings be ignored, only to now see it being reported by a major outlet like the Times as if it's this crazy unforeseen surprise.
Comment by GravitysWasteland at 22/01/2025 at 16:20 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It is a crazy unforeseen surprise for most people though. I mean Yarvin started writing in 2008! The truth is, you had to be EXTREMELY clued in to politics to even have heard any of this. 90% of people don’t care who Peter Thiel is, and those who do, at least half of them are the analogue for ‘George Soros is Satan’ guys. Additionally, it’s hard to see how they connect unless you’re a pretty deep critical thinker. Like on its face, being anti-contraceptive and overturning roe v wade is just about fundamentalist misogyny; in reality, it’s about declining birth rates and the access to consumers/labor market that business has. Seeing how these things connect is demanding a lot out of Americans that were dumb enough to vote Donald in for a second time.
Edit: plus, during trumps first term. It genuinely wasn’t obvious there was a connection beyond some incidental ones (Bannon etc). I had read Yarvin at that point, and he just seemed like a fringe internet weirdo at the time, similar to Nick Fuentes. I saw them as mostly harmless because they weren’t in proximity to any institutional power. Idk that I would have *really* thought that Trump’s admin was fascist back then.