Trump’s Neoreaction Connection?

This is what winning looks like. Winning hard.

Peter Thiel, a major backer of Neoreaction founder Curtis Yarvin’s (moldbug’s) Urbit project, gets a seat right next to Donald Trump at a tech company meeting with the president elect. See above picture. Thiel has been a supporter of Trump for some time and even gave a speech for him in October. And before that at the republican national convention. He is also more or less an official advisor of Trump.

Neoreaction has a number of different strains, but perhaps the most important is a form of post-libertarian futurism that, realizing that libertarians aren’t likely to win any elections, argues against democracy in favor of authoritarian forms of government. In this guise, it’s a heretical offshoot of Valley nerd culture, and has particular associations with Thiel. Mencius Moldbug (real name Curtis Yarvin), the “founder” of neoreaction, is a Bay Area programmer whose start-up, Urbit, is backed by Thiel.

Some remarks by Trump on Thiel:

“I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we had asking to come to this meeting,” Trump said early on, acknowledging Thiel’s advisory role. “Peter was sort of saying, you know, that company is sort of too small.”

“I want to start by thanking Peter,” he continued, “because he saw something very early, maybe before we saw it, and of course he’s known for that in a different way,” perhaps in reference to Thiel’s early support of his candidacy.

Thiel, he added, is “a very special guy.”

He saw something early. You mean like neoreaction and Curtis Yarvin? You mean like CEO of America Trump? Maybe I am reading too much into this, but neocameralism calls for a CEO of America. Both Trump and Thiel are CEOs with experience. They seem to get along well and do so publicly. Very, very few heads of large companies publicly supported Trump during his campaign (were there any?).  Thiel has a direct connection with the founder of neoreaction in the form of giving him large amounts of money. He obviously believes in Moldbug’s technology ideas if he is willing to give him money. Why should we think that support stops with technology?  Honestly, can you say these are bad choices for the new neocameralist joint-stock company of America?

Edit:

Thiel oddly has a Christian connection as well. Apparently he is quite fond of J.R.R Tolkien’s works and has named a number of his companies after things in those books:

Because he is a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings. So far, he has set up six firms (Palantir, Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital, Lembas LLC, Rivendell LLC and Arda Capital) that take their names from Tolkien’s creation.

Tolkien very specifically wrote those books with Christian metaphysics in mind. This is a synchronicity worth considering.

Edit 2:

According to politico, Steve Bannon, who was instrumental in Trump’s campaign and continues as an important advisor, is also a fan of Moldbug’s writing. However, nothing conclusive appears in the article itself. They could have just made it up.

6 Replies to “Trump’s Neoreaction Connection?”

  1. Who knows if Thiel even considers himself NRx. He might just believe that Urbit can make him a lot of money. It is encouraging that he’s not the type to disavow Yarvin though.

  2. Read Thiel’s The Diversity Myth. He is going to go hard at The Cathedral. I’m more excited by the minute.

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