Source: Astral Codex Ten
“Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled The Blogger Who Hates America, it describes him as an ‘inept,’ ‘not exactly coherent’ ‘trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual’ notable for his ‘woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance.’ Yarvin’s fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young’s objections …. Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. … Then in the late 2010s, he caught his first whiff of actual power and dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most …. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit — giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos.” (05/07/25)