The Far-Right Guru Who Has Befriended Silicon Valley’s Extreme Factions

In recent weeks, Democrats have relentlessly blistered Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, using a straightforward message: They’re too weird to hold high office.

If Trump and Vance are weird, imagine what the American public might make of Curtis Yarvin, 51, whose far-right thinking has influenced both Vance and, increasingly, members of the Silicon Valley right, including billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Both Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz have invested in Yarvin’s work.

As an intellectual godfather to these conservatives, Yarvin has laid out a philosophy in which he suggests replacing American democracy with a monarchy. At a recent Palo Alto, Calif., reading of his poetry, he asked his audience to wear “cocktail attire for the new regime.” He has referred to himself and his friends as “dark elves” on a heroic journey to rescue the know-nothing “hobbits” who make up the American populace. And last summer, Yarvin decided that Vibecamp, an annual Burning Man–style meetup of contrarian techies in rural Maryland, wasn’t contrarian enough. So he threw his own party in Washington that attendees called Vibekampf.