understood by studying rhetoric, where aims are metaphysical and una-
chievable. “Real” politics occurs through actions and power manipulation.
In The Machiavellians, a chapter of which Moldbug reproduced in full
on his blog, Burnham argued that good political thought reasons induc-
tively from the past and present to reach conclusions about the struggle
for power.15 Burnham placed himself in the tradition of the Italian post-
Marxist “Elitists” Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto. This
loose group’s central theme was the “iron law of oligarchy:” beneath dem-
ocratic or socialist rhetoric, societies are dominated by elites. Accordingly,
Burnham came to believe that managing elites to maximize liberty and
“civilization” for nonelites was the essential task of political actors.
Drawing Hoppe and Burnham’s antidemocratic insights together
with radical libertarianism, Moldbug made a final leap into reaction
with his discovery of Thomas Carlyle. “Carlyle is the greatest of all,” he
rhapsodized, “because his vision is the broadest.” While “Mises is almost
never wrong,” Carlyle is wrong “frequently.” The Scotsman’s “strokes are
big. He excavates with a pick, not a dental drill. But there is really nothing
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in Mises’ philosophy that is not in Carlyle; and the converse is not the
case.” Moldbug endorses Carlyle’s stress on order above all else, embracing
Carlyle’s belief that the conflict between left and right is ultimately “the
struggle between order and chaos.” “Evil is chaos; good is order. Evil is
left; good is right.”16 Moldbug jokes that Unqualified Reservations is a “late,
decadent, second- rate imitation of Carlyle.”17
In many ways, Moldbug remains committed to radical libertarianism,
but he believes libertarianism has failed because it presupposes order.
Without order, agitating for liberty creates chaos and violence, which
inhibits freedom far more than the state does. By prioritizing order
above all, Moldbug left behind Mises and Rothbard— even Hoppe and
Burnham— and embraced reaction.
Unqualified Reservations and the Desert of the Real
Yarvin’s only work as Moldbug is the blog Unqualified Reservations, which
he began in 2007. Moldbug’s critique of the mainstream American Right
emerged in response to seven years of American conservatism comfort-
able with the role of the federal government. The failure of American
nation- building in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforced his antidemocratic
inclinations, just as the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis of-
fended his libertarian sensibilities. The jubilation around Obama’s candi-
dacy, and then the Obama presidency, fueled Moldbug’s resentment and
confirmed his belief in history’s inevitable leftward trajectory.
The now- defunct blog used the online medium effectively. It featured
frequent updates, sometimes strung together as a series. The basic struc-
ture of Moldbug’s major posts was a critique of progressive hegemony
loaded with “jolts” to wrench readers free from its grasp, followed by a jus-
tification of antidemocratic politics, a sketch of an alternative system, and
a program for neoreactionaries. Moldbug adopted a conversational and
referential tone, alluding to science, history, sci- fi, and political and math-
ematical theory. Through ubiquitous hyperlinks (largely Wikipedia and
Google Books, but also right- wing websites and blogs), Moldbug shared
these references with his reader, developing a web of common allusion
and meaning. Because each post was published separately, Moldbug built
his arguments publicly, sometimes in conversation with readers. One re-
sult of this process was frequent terminological reinvention. Although
his conclusions remained fairly consistent, Moldbug created numerous
neologisms for social classes, problems, and solutions in an attempt to
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Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction
193
generate language free of “progressive” taint. The overall effect of the lan-
guage and style of his blog is of joining a conspiracy and entering a world
of illicit knowledge.
Moldbug offers a totalizing explanation of elite liberal domination that
justifies right- wing rejection of mainstream news sources and academia.
Beneath the rhetoric of democracy, the progressive political and social
order is an “intellectual political machine” that dictates acceptable and
unacceptable thought. Moldbug initially called this regime “Orwellian”
(elsewhere he more accurately calls it Gramscian and Moscan, alluding
to Marxist and post- Marxist thinkers who argued that elites produce
cultures to justify their dominance). Unlike Orwell’s Oceania, progressive
hegemony is decentered, self- regulating, even elegant, but acutely perni-
cious. It “has no center, no master planners,” but reproduces an intellec-
tual elite class whose control over “mass opinion creates power. Power
diverts funds to the manufacturers of opinion, who manufacture more,”
perpetuating progressive control.18
Moldbug calls this “feedback loop” “the Cathedral.” He argues that
progressive elites have established “universalism,” a secularized liberal
Protestantism, as the implicit state religion. Universalism’s pervasiveness
and assumed infallibility infuriate him: he objects “most of all to the insid-
ious way in which the Cathedral has managed to mutate its way around the
‘separation of church and state’ in which it so hypocritically indoctrinates
its acolytes.”19 Molbug’s fixation on free thought reflects the concerns of
his technolibertarian milieu taken to conspiratorial conclusions.
Moldbug’s epistemological critique is typically associated with the
Left.20 But unlike left- wing antifoundationalists comfortable with relativ-
istic concepts of knowledge, Moldbug does not reject the concept of objec-
tive reality. Reflecting the polarized approach to knowledge in American
politics, Moldbug, like the mainstream American Right, is committed to
universal truth.21 He argues that the Left constructs false knowledge that
obscures actual reality and attacks the alleged progressive control of the
media and institutions of power. In doing so, he extends the long- standing
conservative claim that biased, left- wing media and scholarship is dam-
aging the US.22 But Moldbug goes much further. He argues that democ-
racy and political equality, values common to the American Left and Right,
are fraudulent productions of the Cathedral.
To shock readers free from progressive control, Moldbug uses thought
experiments and presents contemporary problems in alien ways. To il-
lustrate the power dynamics inherent in constructing knowledge, for
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example, he imagines a Nazi Wikipedia reliant on Nazi- approved sources.
Many of Moldbug’s arguments, especially those critical of the Left, are
mainstream conservative positions repackaged in calculatedly provoc-
ative terms. To critique affirmative action he describes a society with a
protected class of “nobles,” gradually revealed to be African Americans.
Like many American conservatives, he dismisses climate change science
as an unfalsifiable government- funded boondoggle.23
Moldbug’s treatment of race, however, skirts and exceeds mainstream
conservative acceptability.24 Moldbug views “human neurological uni-
formity” and antiracism as central pillars of universalism. During the
2008 presidential election, he decried the “fundamentally predatory
nature of the black power movement” created by civil rights programs.
Minority crime, in particular, preoccupies Moldbug. He returned to the
subject repeatedly on his blog, highlighting the alleged burying of the
problem of black violent crime by the universalist media.
His blog uses some racial epithets to defy politically correct language
conventions.25 He also put some relatively mainstream conservative
positions in inflammatory terms. He argued that if civil rights programs
were applied to America’s “WASP- Ashkenazi” population, a group of
“genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120” it would “take no more
than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable
scoundrels.” Since these programs were “applied to populations with re-
cent hunter- gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral
fiber,” the result was “absolute human garbage.”26 Moldbug’s point— that
welfare and affirmation action programs have deleterious effects on those
they are intended to help— is uncontroversial on the right, but Moldbug
phrases his claim to incite.27
Moldbug’s racial comments suggest a broader trend: the anonymity of
the internet allows him and others who have followed in his wake to revel
in taboo language, ideas, and activities. Violating social norms is a kind
of liberation for Moldbug: entertaining these ideas is to break from the
Cathedral. Moldbug provides a theoretical justification for the extremely
transgressive anonymous message boards and political “shitposting” that
has manifested online in the past decade.28
The complete ideological transformation required to cast off the
Cathedral is alienating, Moldbug admits, but intoxicating. Moldbug calls
this process “taking the ‘Red Pill,’ ” a reference to the film The Matrix
(1999) in which the protagonist chooses between swallowing a red pill and
escaping a dull digital prison or accepting a blue pill to remain in ignorant
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Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction
195
normalcy. The Red Pill trope is common among web- based right- wing
and antifeminist movements, from the racialist Alt Right to politicized
“gamers,” “pick- up artists,” and the “involuntarily celibate,” (incels).
Angela Nagle suggests it is an especially potent symbol for the growing
number of alienated men. The Red Pill idea rationalizes their isolation
and justifies their antiegalitarianism.29
The Real Enemy is Democracy
Moldbug believes that under the Cathedral’s spurious commitment to
equality and justice is a system of power manipulation. Neoreaction’s
basic assumption is that humans desire power. Interpreting democracy
through this framework, Moldbug claims that democracy’s appeal is that
it disperses power widely, indulging the mass desire for useless fragments
of power. Since power- seeking is pervasive, society trends toward greater
division of power and a concomitant erosion of order. Democracy is a
“dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate,
sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut- wrenching speed,
into tyranny and chaos.” Within the Cathedral, it is rational to obey the
rules of the system. Ambitious individuals are incentivized to embrace
progressive dogma, hence a class of Brahmin progressive elites.
Moldbug rejects the classic republican premise that divided sover-
eignty constrains governments. Instead, he argues that each branch of
government metastasizes, expanding the size and the scope of the state.
Strong governments with clear hierarchies, however, remain small and
narrowly focused. With this insight, Moldbug justifies authoritarianism
on libertarian grounds. The minimal state is achieved by making govern-
ment strong, not by weakening it.
Neoreactionaries look to non- Western states as alternatives. Moldbug
admires Deng Xiaoping for the Chinese leader’s pragmatic, market-
oriented authoritarianism, and praises Singapore as a successful authori-
tarian regime.30 By contrast, he sees the US as soft on crime, economically
delusional, and dominated by Brahmins. The subjects of democracy
cannot recognize its flaws. They have “been taught to worship democ-
racy.” Elections give the illusion of responding to social demands but are
false safety valves that mask progressive control. Since power- seeking is
basic to human nature, democratic drift is chronic. “Cthulu may swim
slowly,” Moldbug wrote, alluding to the hideous Lovecraftian deity, “but
he always swims left.”31
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Neoreaction’s decline story bemoans the defeat of reactionary regimes
and expansion of progressive dominance in the US and around the world.
Although he does not endorse them, Moldbug argues that Wilhelmine
and Nazi Germany fought defensive wars against progressive global con-
quest. He depicts the American Revolution as rabble- rousers violently
opposed to responsible Tories and, drawing on libertarian Confederate-
apologia, construes the American Civil War as the violent imposition of
progressivism on the South.32 On the flip side, the progressive marriage
between “Harvard” and government that forms the Cathedral came in
two stages. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Liberal Republican civil- service
reforms politicized the American academic class. Franklin Roosevelt, a
classic libertarian villain, completed the merger of academia and politics
through the New Deal and its “brains trust.”33
Moldbug’s treatment of historic reactionary regimes also features an-
tidemocratic caveats that distinguish neoreaction from other movements.
Fascism and Nazism were right- wing phenomena, to be sure, but Moldbug
maintains that they were historically specific, democratic distortions
of the Right’s core truth. Order and authority are commonsensical but
unpopular. Advancing order and authority through democracy typically
means joining it with another motivating force like anti- Semitism or na-
tionalism. Nationalism of any kind, including white nationalism, is dan-
gerous precisely because it is democratic. Moldbug’s revisionist histories
place the blame for the horrors of the twentieth century squarely at the
feet of democracy.
What Is to be Done?
The fact that egalitarian rhetoric conceals the rule of progressive elites is
Moldbug’s starting point. The solution is for political discourse to match
real power dynamics. Although h
e moved away from the term, Moldbug
proposed “Formalism”— the formal recognition of realities of power— as
an alternative ideology. Denuded of rhetoric, Americans are “serfs” and
the “US is just a corporation . . . not a mystic trust consigned to us by the
generations.”34 After laying the realities of political power bare, Moldbug
began “solving” the “engineering problem” of political organization.
There are two aspects of Moldbug’s ideal regime: the political struc-
ture and the civil society it engenders. In effect, Moldbug imagines
a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things ex-
cept politics. The ideal economic order is a thoroughgoing acceptance of
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197
Misesian microeconomics. Moldbug proposes nationalizing every asset
and node of power in exchange for cash and then either privatizing them
at auction or destroying them, creating a cash- rich, entirely privatized
society.35 Moldbug envisages an “open society” of free thought and be-
havior constrained by rigorously enforced laws protecting contracts and
preventing violence.36 Many of Moldbug’s views on social issues are con-
ventionally libertarian— he has written in favor of same- sex marriage, the
toleration of private religion, private drug use, and against race- or gender-
based discriminatory laws (although he self- consciously proposed private
welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery). Within a correctly
engineered authoritarian order, Moldbug assumes that maximum eco-
nomic freedom produces the best society. There are libertarian precedents
for this assumption, especially the libertarian Right’s engagement with
Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and 1980s.
The libertarian aspect of Moldbug’s thought is overshadowed by his
antiprogressivism and stark Carlylean authority. Because the most or-
dered system is a unitary command structure with a clear hierarchy,
Moldbug’s model for a new political order is the corporation. He proposes
that the state is privatized to incentivize profit- maximizing governance by
“shareholders” (large owners) who vote for a CEO- monarch. More Steve
Jobs than Henry VIII, the monarch has absolute authority but serves at
the shareholders’ pleasure. Moldbug calls this corporate- monarchy regime
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 33
