Curtis Yarvin, called US president Donald Trump a “modern day Lincoln” on Friday, while praising the president’s Thanksgiving message.Posting on X, the American software engineer turned political theorist, said, “I’ve been hard on the president lately, but to be fair, this is incredible content. It’s not that this is going to happen. It’s not. Certainly not tomorrow or even next year. But no one had permission to say these things.” Yarvin further described Trump’s post as an “instant classic reactionary speech,” comparing it to a sermon from 1709. “Also you can tell he wrote it himself. Truly a modern day Lincoln. Instant classic reactionary speech. Compare to Sacheverell sermon 1709”, he said.Trump in his Thanksgiving post criticised US immigration policy, claiming that certain immigrant groups were harming American cities, and accused Minnesota governor Tim Walz of failing to act.Curtis has become one of the most controversial and influential figures driving the radical ideological changes shaping Donald Trump’s second presidency. The Trump administration’s second-term strategy, including the removal of career civil servants, weakening of checks and balances, and promotion of loyalist executives, closely mirrors Yarvin’s vision of centralised, top-down control.
Who is Cutis Yarvin?
- Curtis Yarvin is a tech entrepreneur turned political theorist.
- He writes under his pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug.
- Born in 1973 in Maryland, Yarvin grew up in a liberal, secular family with a diplomat father and a Protestant mother.
- His paternal grandparents were Jewish-American communists.
- A child prodigy, he joined Johns Hopkins’s Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and graduated high school at the age of 15.
- He studied at Brown University and briefly pursued a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley before dropping out to join the 1990s tech boom.
- Yarvin has influenced conservative circles with ideas favouring centralised, top-down governance.
- He promotes a vision of government that replaces democratic processes with a CEO-style executive leadership.
- He has also proposed the concept of “patchwork sovereignty,” where small, semi-independent units are governed like corporations.
- Yarvin’s key concept, “the Cathedral,” refers to universities, media, and bureaucracies that he believes enforce liberal ideas and suppress dissent, which must be overthrown for meaningful political reform.
- Though he denies being a white nationalist, his work is widely condemned for providing intellectual cover for racist and elitist worldviews.
