Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 32
Dhimmitude: Seventh– Twentieth Century, by Bat Ye’or, International Journal of
Middle East Studies 30, no. 4 (1998): 619– 621.
19. Jerry Gordon, “An Egyptian Jew in Exile: An Interview with Bat Ye’or,” New
English Review, October 2011, http:// www.newenglishreview.org/ custpage.cfm/
frm/ 98500/ sec_ id/ 98500.
20. Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo- Christian Tradition in America,” American
Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984): 65– 85.
21. M. J. C. Warren, “Why ‘Judeo- Christian Values’ are a Dog- Whistle Myth Peddled
by the Far Right,’ Conversation, November 7, 2017, http:// theconversation.com/
why- judeo- christian- values- are- a- dog- whistle- myth- peddled- by- the- far- right-
85922.
22. Pål Norheim, “Hvem stakk av med arvesølvet?” Vagant 4, 2012, http:// www.
vagant.no/ hvem- stakk- av- med- arvesolvet/ .
23. Michael A. Sells, “Christ Killer, Kremlin, Contagion,” in The New Crusades:
Constructing the Muslim Enemy, ed. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 363, 382.
24. Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central
Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
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M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
25. Bangstad, Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia, 150.
26. J. Van Vuuren, “Spur to violence? Anders Behring Breivik and the Eurabia
conspiracy,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 3, no. 4 (2013): 205– 215,
DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.2478/ njmr- 2013- 0013.
27. Andrew F. Brown, “Anders Breivik’s Spider Web of Hate,” Guardian, September
7, 2011, https:// www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2011/ sep/ 07/
anders- breivik- hate- manifesto.
28. Vidar Enebakk, “Fjordmans radikalisering,” in Høyreekstreme ideer og bevegelser i
Europa, ed. Øystein Sørensen, Bernt Hagtvet, Bjørn Arne Steine (Oslo: Dreyer),
45– 101; Peter Jackson, “The Licence to Hate: Peder Jensen’s Fascist Rhetoric
in Anders Breivik’s Manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence,”
Democracy and Security 9, no. 3 (2013): 247– 269.
29. Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, “Islam og det åpne samfunn,” blog post, Verdens
Gang Debatt, August 21, 2003, http:// vgd.no/ index.php/ samfunn/ innvandring-
rasisme- og- flerkultur/ tema/ 465438/ innlegg/ .
30. Bruce Bawer, The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre
to Silence Debate About Islam (London: Harper Collins, 2012).
31. Simen Sætre, Fjordman: Portrett av en anti- islamist (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2013).
32. Cass Sunstein, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2013).
33. Robert Spencer, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-
Muslims (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2005).
34. For a genealogy and critique of the notion of the so- called Muslim world, see
Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017).
35. Niall Ferguson, “The Way We Live Now: 4- 4- 04; Eurabia?” New York Times
Magazine, April 4, 2004, http:// www.nytimes.com/ 2004/ 04/ 04/ magazine/ the-
way- we- live- now- 4- 4- 04- eurabia.html.
36. Sedgwick, “Origins and Growth.”
37. Samuel Orbaum, “Resentment and Revenge,” Jerusalem Post, April 26, 2002.
Cited by Sedgwick, “Origins and Growth.”
38. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia, 9.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking
of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
41. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia, 10.
42. Ibid., 11.
43. Ibid., 20.
44.
See Reza Zia-
Ebrahimi, “When the Elders of Zion Relocated in
Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialization in Antisemitism and Islamophobia,”
Patterns of Prejudice 52, no. 4 (2018): 314– 337.
45. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia, 148.
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Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
183
46. Ibid., 149.
47. Griffith, “Review of Bat Ye’or,” 621.
48. Spencer, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, 31, citing Bat Ye’or, Decline of Eastern
Christianity.
49. Bat Ye’or, Decline of Eastern Christianity, 219.
50. See John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009) for a good study of the concept of jihad in Islamic
history.
51. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia, 31.
52. Ibid., 32.
53. Ibid., 31.
54. See Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World; Caroline Frankel, Osman’s Dream: The
Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300– 1929 (London: John Murray, 2006); Eugene
Rogan, The Arabs: A History (London: Penguin Press, 2012); and David
Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2015).
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185
PART III
Emergent Thinkers
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187
12
Mencius Moldbug and
Neoreaction
Joshua Tait
I N 2 0 0 7 , C U R T I S YA R V I N began his weblog Unqualified Reservations in
order to “build a new ideology.”1 Through dozens of posts as “Mencius
Moldbug,” the San Francisco– based software engineer developed a heady
critique of democracy and the nature of knowledge. Seeking to break free
from a “thought control” system dominated by soft- headed progressive
elites, Moldbug rejects the “virus” of democracy. As an alternative philos-
ophy, Moldbug fuses radical libertarian thought with authoritarianism as
“neoreaction.” Only a reassertion of authority and hierarchy against de-
mocracy and egalitarianism will halt society’s catastrophic decline.
Moldbug is an early example of important new trends in radical Right
thought and activism. His blog broached long- taboo themes within the
mainstream American Right that have since gained currency among the
Alt Right and even the Trump White House. He pioneered anonymous,
online, antiprogressive activism through his blend of bleak political anal-
ysis and irreverent humor, prefiguring the Alt Right. Beyond the small
movement of explicit neoreactionaries, Moldbug has links with the prom-
inent radical Right website Breitbart, the former White House chief strat-
egist Steve Bannon, and the influential billionaire investor Peter Thiel.
Moldbug has helped popularize a burgeoning American right- wing turn
against democracy and traditional conservative norms, and helped nor-
malize racialist views previously absent from American conservatism.
Moldbug is a new type of radical Right activist at odds with the conservative
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E M E R G E N T T H I N K E R S
mainstream: young, coastal, anonymous, secular, male, and adept at
manipulating digital technologies to advance an antiprogressive agenda.
The Unqualified Reservations blog garnered Moldbug’s outsized in-
fluence for an anonymous blogger. He became the founding theorist
of the “neoreactionary” movement, an online collection
of writers de-
termined to theorize a superior alternative to democracy. At least one
neoreactionary colleague considers Moldbug “one of only a few political
writers today who will be read one hundred years from now.”2 Social
Matter, the “flagship Neoreactionary web magazine,” and neoreaction.
net, which collects Moldbug’s work together with his influences and
acolytes, are two of several interlinked online communities that regard
Moldbug’s work as an important rediscovery of the reactionary tradition.3
Sometimes called the “Reactionary Enlightenment,” neoreaction is
an alchemy of authoritarian and libertarian thought. As a neoreactionary,
Moldbug resents the trajectory of modern history but doesn’t share
the “shipwrecked mind” typical of some reactionaries who project
idealized visions onto the past, hoping to restore it by radical means.4
Neoreactionaries consider the past instructive, perhaps even superior to
the present, but are essentially futurists. Moldbug has a complex relation-
ship to the Enlightenment values that dominate in mainstream American
political thought. Unlike irrationalist thinkers like Julius Evola and Alain
de Benoist, Moldbug believes in secular, observable reality clearly under-
standable by reason; his major complaint with progressivism is its alleged
falsification of reality. Nor is he a “throne and altar” thinker. His ideal so-
ciety is cosmopolitan and socially free. However, Moldbug also rejects key
political ideals of the Enlightenment. He opposes human equality and the
promises of democracy.
Neoreaction’s vision is antihumanist and nihilistic. Moldbug thinks
overwhelmingly in terms of systems and the grand, almost mechanistic,
operation of laws, principles, and trends. His thought generally has little
room for human agency. People, he argues, act within rigid structures,
driven by basic motivations. The complexities of human behavior and so-
ciety barely exist in his pursuit of the perfectly engineered political system.
Nor does his focus on systems and rational behavior leave much room
for the intricacies and durability of historically specific social norms, like
business practices or kin relationships, lending Moldbug’s thought a cer-
tain artificiality.
Moldbug strikingly shows how new web- based media promulgates
radical Right ideas to new audiences. The web has fostered anonymous
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Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction
189
subcultures of socially disaffected people, fostering predominantly male
antiprogressive subcultures.5 Moldbug is both an influence on this class
and an early instance of it. His antiprogressive critiques justify these groups’
rejection of society. And because Moldbug largely uses online sources to
develop his arguments, he also reflects new trends in right- wing thought
and activism made possible by the internet’s drastic lowering of barriers
to entry into mass communication. Since 2010 online antiprogressive ac-
tivism has grown dramatically. Digital activism takes many forms: verbal
fights in the comments sections of major websites; Twitter “armies” of
users sharing content en masse or targeting individuals for abuse. During
the 2016 presidential election, radical Right activists generated thousands
of darkly comic and politically loaded images or “memes” to attack Hillary
Clinton. Sometimes online targeting becomes criminal with threats of vi-
olence and leaks of personal details.
There are important tensions in Moldbug’s thought. He advocates
hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futur-
istic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and re-
action. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily
antiprogressive. He presents himself as a thinker in search of truth but
admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and
irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures among the online Right.
Technolibertarian Foundations
Part of Moldbug’s mystique is that he comes from the “Brahmin” so-
cial class that, he claims, dominates the US. He was born in 1973 into
a highly- educated secular Jewish family connected with the Ivy League
and State Department. Moldbug spent parts of his childhood abroad,
mainly in Cyprus, before returning to the US around 1985.6 Shortly after,
he was selected to participate in Johns Hopkins’s longitudinal Study of
Mathematically Precocious Youth. He entered college in 1988, graduating
from Brown in 1992 before dropping out of the Computer Science Division
of the University of California at Berkley.7
Moldbug was shaped by 1980s and 1990s Silicon Valley programmer
and internet subculture. Before neoreaction, he explored libertarianism,
a worldview that “in many- blossomed efflorescence” is the “pervasive
Weltanschauung” of the overwhelmingly male American high- tech cul-
ture.8 As Paulina Borsook argues, libertarianism fits with tech culture for
several reasons. First, engineers like Yarvin are typically sorted through
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competitive academic programs, which they consider analogous to the
competition imagined in a libertarian society. Secondly, their world is ra-
tional, rule- bound, and solvable. Within the subculture, computer soft-
ware and hardware are the dominant metaphors for society. Such thinking
dovetails with the ironclad assumptions about human and market behav-
ior of the Austrian School of Economics led by Ludwig von Mises. Tech
culture’s systems focus also accords with libertarianism’s concentration
on efficiency and “solving” government. Finally, tech culture venerates
science, treating human biology as determinative and confirming their
mechanistic assumptions about humanity.
Silicon Valley libertarians are not nostalgic for a mythical past.
Working with cutting- edge technology gives programmer culture a fu-
turist bent that combines widespread enthusiasm for science fiction with
the promises of the early internet. Science fiction has long been used for
political experimentation: seminal writers like Ursula Le Guin and Robert
Heinlein consciously used the genre to explore libertarian concepts and
imagine possible alternative regimes. For early adopters, the internet was
a digital libertarian society. It offered privacy, free- thinking, and ordered
but essentially free interaction.9 These themes became technolibertarian
priorities and saturate Moldbug’s mature writing.
Embracing Reaction: From Misesian to Carlylean
Moldbug’s intellectual trajectory was a rightward march. He shifted from
the liberalism of his family, through the cultural libertarianism of Silicon
Valley, in and out of mainstream American conservatism and radical lib-
ertarianism, and ultimately arrived at neoreaction. Much of Moldbug’s
political evolution happened online, where he had access to right- wing
texts and avenues to pursue a study in right- wing thought. Moldbug read
numerous key thinkers of mainstream American
conservatism.
The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor and blogger
Glenn Reynolds introduced Moldbug to the radical libertarian tradition,
informed by the early twentieth- century Austrian- American economist
Ludwig von Mises.10 One of Mises’s most important American popularizers,
Murray Rothbard, excoriated government intervention, advocating an
anarcho- capitalist alternative.11 Mises and the Austrian School reject em-
piricism in favor of deductive reasoning from assumptions about human
behavior and economic principles. This “applied logic” economics coheres
with Moldbug’s engineering mind- set. For Moldbug, Mises “is a titan” and
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Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction
191
“Rothbard is a giant.”12 However, although he continues to embrace im-
portant aspects of libertarianism, Moldbug’s reading of the nineteenth-
century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle convinced him that without
authoritarianism, libertarianism was ineffectual at best and destructive
at worst.
Moldbug’s first break with democracy came through Rothbard’s intellec-
tual successor, Hans- Hermann Hoppe. In his 2001 book, Democracy: The
God that Failed, Hoppe argued that in order to appease voters, democratic
leaders have every incentive to exhaust resources and mismanage the
economy for short- term gains. Democracy, he argues, causes long- term
civilizational decline. By contrast, because monarchies are the private
domain of monarchs, they are incentivized to maximize profits over the
long- term. Moreover, conflicts between monarchies are shorter and less
destructive than democratic conflicts, partly because prolonged warfare
risks damaging the monarch’s property.13 Moldbug laments that Hoppe is
“a sound formalist at every layer up to the top,” but rejects “sovereign prop-
erty as a royalist plot.”14 For Moldbug, Hoppe’s failure of nerve illustrates
the extent of the progressive hegemony that prohibits people from enter-
taining nonconsensual politics.
Another of Moldbug’s principal influences was the conservative the-
orist James Burnham, whose thought informs Moldbug’s “realism” and
attention to power structures. Burnham argued that politics cannot be