Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin is a blogger.

One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made

One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made. Not in the petty and obvious way of a normal bad movie, though. It is a grand, multifaceted masterpiece of badness. It is dramatically bad, morally bad, historically bad and even erotically bad. And to cram in all this badness, it is an hour too long. But you won’t be bored – it is even entertainingly bad. This film is so bad that most people will think it is good, and it will probably make a lot of money. Proving only that America is the kingdom of Cain. But we knew that. But why not start with praise, eh? The film has a beautiful celluloid look.

Battle

Britain’s MAGA moment is coming

Summer is fun. Winter is serious. Autumn in London feels almost Boolean – the light, the air, the mood, seemed to turn on an equinox dime. The political situation, I heard, had grown even stranger since my last sojourn. “Cool Britannia” is dead. Nothing today is more dated than centrism. And yet the inexorable rules of the unwritten constitution mean no election until 2029. And the great barbarian, Nigel Farage, his weapons a grin and a beer, lies in wait as his numbers rise. Like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, in an age of immediate media, Farage’s great weapon is that he is human. The same in public and private. Who is Kemi Badenoch in private, or Keir Starmer? Are they even anatomically correct? Someone must know. We never will.

Farage

The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson at his most transparent

My name is Curtis. I’m a GenXer. I love Wes Anderson. I also like IPAs. Sometimes it’s OK to be a cliché. The Phoenician Scheme is not Wes Anderson’s best movie (that would be The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), or even his second-best. It may be his most transparent, though. Wes Anderson is certainly our auteuriest of major auteurs. A Wes Anderson film knows it’s a Wes Anderson film and doesn’t mind that at all. As a monarchist, I always point to auteur theory as a micro-reflection of my crackpot political theories. If it were possible for corporations to make movies by committee, it would certainly be done that way. But it isn’t. Instead, even the most hackneyed superhero sequel has a director – just as even the cheapest taquería has a chef.

Anderson

My DC bunker

Washington, DC My office this week has been the Starbucks on Capitol Hill. Any random subscriber to my Substack can get a half-hour with me if they book a slot. I do this a lot when I travel and oddly, given the rot of this rotting world, I rarely come away with the feeling that here were 30 precious minutes I’ll never see again. I often want to spend an hour or two. And no one yet has killed or even attacked me. A leftist policy wonk did show up without an appointment, but he just wanted to talk about Ezra Klein. One of this week’s characters was a Russia expert at a foreign policy thinktank, who seems to really know his stuff. He filled in important nuances ofthe Prigozhin coup. Yevgeny Prigozhin never meant to overthrow Vladimir Putin, he said.

curtis yarvin dc

Curtis Yarvin on Britain’s demise, Putin’s red line & Churchill-bashing

From our UK edition

50 min listen

Curtis Yarvin, is a political theorist and writer known for his critiques of liberal democracy. Under the pseudonym 'Mencius Moldbug' he developed ideas that have influenced the New Right and post liberal political movements. Curtis Yarvin spoke to The Spectator's Angus Colwell about why Britain is in decline, how far Europe should go to protect itself against Putin, whether Churchill-bashing is fair, and what would be his top three book recommendations.

Should America have a monarch?

From our UK edition

46 min listen

Freddy Gray talks to writer and philosopher Curtis Yarvin about how Alexander Hamilton was America's Napoleon, why Putin is more of a royal than King Charles, and why Yarvin admires FDR.  Yarvin is voting for Joe Biden at the next election, but not for the reasons you might think. Could Biden 2024 strengthen the case for American isolationism? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy.

What is going on with Curtis Yarvin

From our UK edition

84 min listen

Curtis Yarvin is, according to the New York Times, a 'neo-reactionary blogger'. What would Henry VII make of Elizabeth II? What good has American foreign policy done? Why did he support the war in Iraq? And who are the best Victorian writers? Yarvin joins Freddy Gray.