In any case, reasonably educated people all over the world are aware of how much these wannabe techno-dictators can interfere in their domestic politics. All those countries have populations large enough to notice their philosophies and flag them to the highest level.
“Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.”
Because your summarization is blatantly inaccurate. As you can clearly see above, they set the premise that Thiel believes freedom is incompatible with democracy, hence he subverts democracy with political influence and data mining in order to “preserve freedom” from HIS perspective. That’s a perfectly coherent statement for which there is plenty of evidence to support.
> Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy.
What part of authoritarianism is pro-freedom again?
Democracy was obviously never pro-freedom - it's explicitly about the 51% taking freedom from the 49%.
I'm just confused how this twisted leftist publication has managed the mental acrobatics to claim pro-freedom means pro-authoritarianism.
The real ("red pill", lol) dynamic is that rightist and leftist are essentially modes of thinking. Rightism favors deductive thinking - simple rules to follow including a social status hierarchy, a fundamentalist axiomatic conception of rights, etc. Leftism favors inductive thinking - analysis of the qualitative outcomes of given rules, avoiding formalism because every abstraction necessarily leaves something out, etc.
BOTH are required to actually fully analyze situations, otherwise you're only using half your brain!! Political propaganda emphasizes one mode of thinking while making you tune out the other (helped along because what it implies is uncomfortable, especially as you become less used to thinking that way).
But neither one makes for a full social theory on its own. Try to implement an all-encompassing "leftist" society (eg communism), and formal hierarchical rightist structures necessarily remain at the top asserting central control - the revolutionaries certainly aren't going to pack up and go back to their previous lives. Likewise, try and implement an all-compassing "rightist" society and informal bottom-up movements necessarily crop up seeking autonomy from the overbearing top-down control [1].
As such, the neoreactionary movement might have had worthwhile constructive results if they had succeeded at getting one of these so-called philosopher kings into a position of political leadership. There are a lot of things that are broken about our society, with political incentives keeping them stuck in local minima (in the computational NP-hard sense) [0].
However instead, when the neoreactionaries got a taste of political power they did exactly what every other political movement does - compromise their values to serve power. Putting on my Moldbug-thinking hat and reading Yarvin's "The Butterfly Revolution" was downright shocking. The only way you get from reactionary populism red in tooth and claw to enlightened hierarchical rule is through societal collapse, regardless of how you dress it up in flowery prose.
[0] This is a failure mode of a leftism. The corresponding failure mode of rightism is terrible destructive orders being dictated from an incompetent dictator...
[1] I think to the extent that the neofascists are aware of this, they think they are going to be able to keep it contained with digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and "AI". It fits their pattern of reading books but not understanding their lessons (specifically here sci-fi tech dystopias).
"We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/po...
I still do think racism is a pretty impotent critique though. The driving goal of these people isn't racial segregation, but rather power. They're leaning into the latent racism in our society as a source of energy. But when you make a deal with the Devil, the Devil will always ultimately win. These people (drunk on big data and now LLMs) think they can beat the Devil at his own game, as they lead Western society to ruin.
Anyway, I’m sure at this point that Yarvin is genuinely a white supremacist who no longer feels the need to hide his true nature. Some of the racist things he says are too repulsive to serve a practical political purpose. (Like suggesting that we should bring back Black slavery to replace deported laborers.)
I'm not saying Yarvin is not fully steeped in white supremacy by now - I mean seriously how hard would it be to find a different word? Has he run out of words from all that prolix writing?
It just feels like a pretty ineffective and nonproductive angle of critique. It's what they expect and have already set up their individual and collective armor to deflect it (eg how "deplorables" played out).
The real problem is that authoritarian societies don't innovate. People felt this suffocation from the creeping bureaucratic authoritarianism, which is why they were tempted to buy into this autocratic garbage in the first place. But the failure modes of autocratic authoritarianism are so much worse. Never mind starting off with a demented moron at the helm, making even the initial trajectory point downwards.
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