What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment Movement

Ed Simon

Time

03/24/2025

Yarvin speaks disparagingly of something that he calls “The Cathedral,” a nexus of educational, media, and nonprofit organizations that he believes sets the tenor for discourse, but that also impedes the liberty of executives to do what they will. Rather his aspiration is, as he wrote in 2007, that “the state is simply a real estate business on a very large scale.”

Using a variety of mixed metaphors, Yarvin advocates for a “Butterfly Revolution,” a “full power start” to the U.S. government accomplished by “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization.”  This is imagined as an internal coup meant to privatize the government and replace democracy with complete executive authority. Two years ago, Yarvin laid out his strategic program with the acronym “RAGE,” or “Retire all government employees.” Yarvin argued that a hypothetical future Trump administration should terminate all nonpolitical federal workers to have them be replaced by loyalists. The government’s coffers must then be impounded and redirected, according to the blogger. When courts prevent unconstitutional orders, Yarvin says that they should just be ignored. After that, the free press and universities must be curtailed, as well—Yarvin said no later than April after the inauguration.

That so much of this seems to mirror the actions of the Trump administration and DOGE may not be a coincidence. So far, some 30,000 federal employees—across departments as varied as the FDA, the National Park Service, and the FAA—have been fired by DOGE in the name of government efficiency. Yarvin’s musings in 2009 that the “definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law,” hold a mirror to Trump’s February tweet that “He who save his country, violates no law.”

Yarvin’s claim that “No brand or building can survive” is perfectly congruent with the tech industry’s notorious ethos to “Move fast and break things.” But what’s also being seemingly witnessed is a harbinger of the “monarchism” that Yarvin desires. On February 19, Trump posted a doctored image of himself in a crown with the caption “Long Live the King!” on his social media app Truth Social.