We have gone further in our convictions. We reject more!
—Lebezyatnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
It is safe to say that on May 5, 2025, Danielle Allen sat in the proximity of Curtis Yarvin at the Harvard Faculty Club. Fact-checkers will back me up. But the ensuing event defies further description. It was billed and conducted as a debate—a controversy that could have figured as the Lincoln vs. Douglas or Baldwin vs. Buckley of our time. Yet it was a strangely one-sided non-affair. Allen, the distinguished political philosopher, tried to strike a balance between responding to some of the neo-reactionary provocateur’s general propositions while also letting him have his spicier takes on Cotton Mather, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the missing link. He, in turn, seemed unable to realize just how far out of his depth he was. Watching him brandish his chatroom Darwinism was like watching a grizzly bear attempt to eat a plate of grapes with chopsticks. Any educated observer watching the footage cannot but wince as Yarvin repeatedly accuses Allen of speaking in “abstractions” (i.e., ideas), mispronounces words (e.g., “ochlocracy”), and uses terms like equality and democracy as if oblivious to their various possible senses. I count Allen as a mentor and friend; I am partial to her. But do not take my word for it. Watch the video. Regarded as a debate, this was the intellectual equivalent to sending an AH-64 Apache helicopter into combat against a garden gnome. It wasn’t close.
And yet this is precisely the age of the gnome, the troll, the hobbit, the golem—and all manner of wee folk who blog against The System in which they now prosper. Regarded not as a debate but as a meme, the event was therefore highly satisfactory. In this corner: one of the more distinguished and celebrated academics in the United States, a scholar of democracy, a classicist and political theorist with two PhDs, one of Harvard’s twenty-five University Professors. In the other corner: a cult figure with the nom de blog “Mencius Moldbug,” who has achieved international notoriety for some Pretty Online notions. Their very pairing was another little tear in an already tattered brain-reality continuum: a sight not unlike that of buffalo guy rampaging through the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But, unlike QAnon Shaman, who had to batter his way in, Yarvin is now the toast of DC. He is a prominent sibyl of the right, someone whose writings have found sympathetic resonance in Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Stephen Miller, Michael Anton, and J.D. Vance. And according to a Reddit galaxy a click or two away, Yarvin emerged as the hands-down winner of his appearance with Allen. It was weird.
From one angle, the weirdness was due to familiar questions about whether these two were well matched. Allen agreed to debate on the grounds that Yarvin’s influence needs to be disputed outright. Both parties agreed, during the event, that there should be more such debating and viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet one would have to add that debates presuppose shared agreements of rational practice and justification, such that some kinds of positions have to be excluded from the outset. Academic freedom and free speech can be fruitfully exercised only to the active exclusion of ideas so heinous, outré, or cranky as to not be worth taking up. Free speech would not be well served if the wrongness of slavery or the roundness of Earth had to be revisited from scratch anytime someone expressed skepticism about them.
These tacit agreements about where to draw the lines of admissibility are nonetheless fast fraying, such that some meaningful number of Harvard undergraduates want to hear what Yarvin has to say. From another angle, some might say that Yarvin is the most influential spokesman for a suite of ideas that have been unfairly ruled out-of-bounds by the dominant gatekeepers of culture over the past decades, that this very influence is proof that the progressive control of intellectual culture has stifled thought and created a demand for reactionary alternatives, and that higher ed can no more afford to avert its eyes from this backlash now than Harvard can afford to ignore the White House or, indeed, the new digital right itself. To pair the literate Harvard scholar with the digital autodidact and edgelord was, in this sense, completely appropriate. As Allen noted in her opening remarks, this was Enlightenment versus “Dark Enlightenment”: two readings of the American trajectory.
These are fearful asymmetries. The inescapable sense of their false equivalence, however, was due neither to the content of their views nor to their relative influence but to the fact that these two Enlightenments are not even up to the same things. While Yarvin is undoubtedly doing something very well, that is, one would be wrong to mistake that something for rationality. His notions don’t bear close scrutiny, and he doesn’t seem to mean them to; they are not well suited to being dialectically examined in debate. (“I’m a poster, not a writer.”) A notable difference between the two speakers’ responses was precisely that Allen advanced arguments, claims, and principles, whereas Yarvin offered intricate set pieces, analogies, touchpoints, and anecdotes, suggesting a learning as eclectic as it is superficial: an open-ended series of links. And this is, paradoxically, the source of his strength—not only because his writing balks at the seriousness that would make it subject to test and refutation but also because he has made it just about impossible to evaluate, describe, or even to write about his work with something like dispassionate clarity.
Yarvin is a consequential figure, but not on account of his body of thought. Approaching Yarvin as a “political philosopher” (as the moderator of the debate with Allen introduced him) is approximately as helpful as approaching Jerry Springer as a moral theorist: One comes away with the sense that the joke is only ever on oneself for trying to get to the bottom of him in such terms. Nor is his practical influence what most matters. Evidence of anyone in the Trump administration trying to carry out some program in accordance with Yarvin’s posts is scant and exaggerated. Rather, Yarvin’s significance consists in his having discovered and explored some of the key gestures, triggers, devices, and attitudes that now govern the reality of digital politics itself. He realized that digital speech means a new kind of psychic and aesthetic war—new conformations of “us” and “them”—and he understood that it could only be fought For The Win.