NRx Movement

Source

This is from an unsigned Memorandum:

* Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries. February 5, 2025

Discussion

The Rise of the NRx Movement

The ongoing restructuring of U.S. digital and administrative systems must be understood in the broader context of the neoreactionary (NRx) movement, a “Dark Enlightenment” ideology advocating for the dismantling of democracy in favor of centralized corporate or monarchic rule. Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin are the foremost proponents of this ideology. Touted as the “godfather of accelerationism,” Land has argued that democracy inherently leads to societal decline and proposed that societies should be run more like corporations, with competent elites at the top, akin to CEO-style governance rather than electoral politics.

Similarly, Curtis Yarvin also known as “Mencius Moldbug,” has extensively written about his vision for replacing democracy with an “efficient” autocratic regime controlled by a CEO and technocratic elite:

- "If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia….One way of dealing with that is.... hire two executives, make sure they work together and there is really no other solution…"

- “Assuming security and responsibility, how could we produce effective government in California? The answer: find the world’s best CEO, and give him undivided control over budget, policy and personnel.”

- “But—if you agree with me that democracy is the problem, not the solution—there’s also nothing wrong with a military coup in which the military expresses this same realization...Therefore, it is justified in seizing, and either dissolving or privatizing according to its best judgment, all subsidized or officially supported information organs of the old mediocracy, including universities, newspapers, TV and radio stations, schools, etc. Probably the first option is the safest….In a post-mediocratic state, education is a purely parental responsibility. Young people will learn whatever their parents choose to teach them, or have them taught, or expose them to. Official involvement in this process, even in the form of subsidies, is unthinkable. Likewise, journalism is a purely private function.”

Doxxing Controversy: NRx Gets Exposed

Yarvin first came to prominence after being reported in a TechCrunch article, “Geeks for Monarchy,” in 2013—after Peter Thiel had invested in Yarvin’s start-up company (Urbit), alongside Balaji Srinavasan, then an Andreessen Horowitz partner.

The article alarmed his affiliates, including Thiel, Blake Masters, Patri Friedman, Michael Gibson, and Srinavasan, who suggested in correspondence retaliating against journalists:

-“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts,” Srinivasan said in an email viewed by the New York Times.

Mr. Thiel, a participant in the email thread, urged their colleagues to keep quiet.

Yarvin replied to Srinavasan:

-“Dude, control the frame….If you make a big thing of it, you prove their point…You and I have different vulnerabilities, you because you’re in the closet and I because I’m out of it...”

Srinvasan contemplated an attack-back strategy, and acknowledged “It might mean moving to Singapore though as endgame.” (Since then, Srinvasan has renounced his citizenship and resides in Singapore).

NRx Entanglements: PayPal Mafia meets Network States

Neoreactionary ideas, once fringe, have gained traction in Silicon Valley and among influential political operatives, including those now embedded in Musk’s network of power. Both Marc Andreessen (partner at venture-capital firm A16Z and author of the Techo-Optimist Manifesto) and former colleague Balaji Srinavasan (author of the Network State) cite Land and Yarvin, respectively. The “PayPal Mafia”—a network of early PayPal executives including Peter Thiel, now AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks, and Elon Musk—have also played a key role in mainstreaming neoreactionary ideas. In his 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel concluded democracy was incompatible with technological progress. Thiel also believes that monopolies are good, competition is bad, and the most successful companies create and sustain monopolies.

In an interview, Musk tacitly affirmed and expanded Peter’s claim to apply to government:

- “I think its a false dichotomy to look at government and sort of industry as separate…government is…the ultimate corporation,” calling it a “monopoly that can’t go bankrupt, or usually cannot go bankrupt.” Both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have more prominently participated in American politics, and notably built businesses that perform critical government functions. Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, a firm that provides data analytics and surveillance tools for U.S. intelligence agencies, the military, and law enforcement, handling tasks that range from predictive policing and counterterrorism to managing battlefield intelligence. Similarly, Thiel-backed Anduril Industries is developing autonomous defense systems and border surveillance technology.

Musk, the wealthiest man alive, operates Neuralink, Boring Company, SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter) and xAI. Musk’s SpaceX has replaced NASA in launching U.S. astronauts and provides the Pentagon with military satellite deployment, while Starlink’s internet services have been used in war zones, including Ukraine, raising questions about who controls critical infrastructure in geopolitical conflicts (Starlink has more satellites in orbit than the rest combined). Additionally, Tesla’s Superchargers have become the national standard for electric vehicle charging, with more than 49% of the US electric vehicle market. Tesla’s AI and energy infrastructure have positioned Musk as a key player in electric grid management and autonomous military applications, with the Pentagon exploring Tesla’s AI-powered robotics for future defense use (despite past surveillance abuses).

Meanwhile, Musk’s ownership of X (formerly Twitter) has turned Musk into an operator of one of the largest digital town squares that shapes discourse around the intersection of technology and politics worldwide. The scope and scale of his companies blur the line between public and private power, executing state-level functions but funded and backed by shareholders.

“The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. ‘We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,’ he told me.” In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.”

Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV:

- ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ [translation: “I am the state”]”

NRx Politics

The neoreactionary movement’s engagement in American politics has been limited and highly targeted, reflecting a strategic approach rather than a broad ideological movement. Peter Thiel, its most prominent financial backer, has intervened selectively, supporting candidates with personal and professional ties to him rather than building a mass political base. His first major political foray came in 2016, when he publicly endorsed and donated $1.25 million to Trump, an unusual move for a Silicon Valley billionaire. Yet, his political activity remained sparse until 2022, when he invested heavily in two Senate candidates—J.D. Vance in Ohio ($15M) and Blake Masters in Arizona ($10M). Both had worked closely with Thiel: Vance worked at Mithril Capital after law school before receiving early backing from Thiel’s network ($100M) to form a venture fund, Narya Capital, while Masters had been a long-time employee and protégé at Thiel Capital a co-author of the book, Zero to One. Thiel’s strategy of funding insiders rather than outsiders reflects the limited ambitions of the neoreactionary movement—a tactical elite project rather than a popular uprising. Thiel himself has retreated from direct political funding, declining to back any candidates in 2024. Yet his political experiment has succeeded beyond expectation—with Vance not only securing a Senate seat but rising to the Vice Presidency despite past opposition to Trump, declaring him to be an “idiot” and “reprehensible.”

Elon Musk, on the other hand, remained apolitical until late 2022, when he publicly broke with the Democratic Party and began amplifying messaging on X (formerly Twitter). His political influence surged in 2024, when he donated $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC over three months and used X to push Trump’s candidacy. Musk’s strategy has been more aggressive than Thiel’s, including hosting Republican primary debates, and pledging to give $1 million a day to Trump supporters in swing states—a move that faced legal scrutiny over potential election law violations.

NRx Cynicism

- “Caesar was an Olympian. Trump Should be on Ozempic.”

Curtis Yarvin has a vision for an “American Caesar”—a strong leader who would dismantle existing democratic institutions and centralize power. Yarvin has emphasized the necessity for such a leader to act decisively

- “When Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn't sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon.”

Yet, Yarvin also writes, “Trump is no Caesar.”

Yarvin dismisses the President’s capability to enact the kind of regime change Yarvin envisions. Instead, he cynically portrays the President as an aging showman who reflects the shallowness of his era rather than the grandeur of history. “Caesar was an Olympian. Trump should be on Ozempic.”

Despite this open disdain for the President, Yarvin recognizes the President’s utility—not as a leader, but as a tool. His trials, legal battles, and media spectacle provoke the regime into overreach, accelerating its own decay. Yarvin describes the state as “the motor of revolution,” arguing that it is not insurgents like Trump who drive systemic collapse, but the regime itself, which reacts in ways that ultimately weaken its own legitimacy. The prosecution of the President, Yarvin suggests, creates a self-destructive cycle, where the government’s attempts to neutralize him only deepen public disillusionment with democracy. Yarvin even rejects the revolutionary impulse among the President’s supporters. He derides January 6 as “the last lame breath of mobocracy in America” and scoffs at the idea that Trump’s base—“used-car dealers, general contractors, small-town investment advisors”—could ever rise up and install a new “Trumpenreich.”

Curtis Yarvin reveals a cynical instrumentalism—he does not admire the President as a leader, but rather sees him as a useful accelerant for the collapse of the current political order. Yarvin’s vision is post-revolutionary—he doesn’t want the President to fight the system from within, but to pave the way for a more competent, technocratic strongman to emerge. In Yarvin’s framing, the President is not a hero or a savior; he is a wrecking ball, a blunt instrument of destruction who can be discarded once the old order collapses. His movement may be politically useless, but as a spectacle, as a symbol of institutional failure, the President’s role is indispensable.

- “In a world where voters elect Trump with a mandate to just take over the government—as completely as the Allies took over the government of Germany in 1945—he will probably screw it up, anyway. Yet he doesn’t have to screw it up. (The only way to not screw it up, for Donald Trump, is to be the chairman of the board, and delegate to a single executive ready to be the plenary CEO of America.)”

Rather than a mass movement, neoreactionary politics operates as an elite-driven insurgency, leveraging intellectual narratives and populism (Yarvin), financial backing (Thiel), social, campaign and technical backing (Musk) and political frontmen (Vance) to shift power away from democratic institutions and into the hands of an elite. The hollowing out of government, the privatization of state functions, and the centralization of decision-making in unelected corporate-backed figures—once abstract concepts in Yarvin’s writings—who make a spectacle of the Presidency are now being tested at the highest levels of government."

NRx Agenda

Curtis Yarvin’s neoreactionary ideology advocates for a strategy called “RAGE” (Retire All Government Employees) — a framework designed to systematically hollow out bureaucratic institutions by forcing mass resignations, replacing career officials with loyalists, and centralizing control under a single technocratic leader. Yarvin’s belief is that the “deep state” must be dismantled from within, clearing the way for an autocratic governance model where decisions are made swiftly without bureaucratic constraints.

Musk’s actions at OPM closely follow the RAGE blueprint:

● Encouraging federal employees to leave through mass buyout offers and email campaigns.

● Disrupting internal agency operations by removing career officials and replacing them with loyalists from private industry.

● Weakening transparency and accountability by limiting access to internal systems and policy discussions.

This blueprint was expressed by Vice President Vance, who in the past has expressed affinity to Vance’s ideology and willingness to escalate a constitutional crisis:

- “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things…I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people….And when the courts stop you…stand before the country, and say…the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The capture of OPM is not just an administrative shake-up—it represents an existential threat to the integrity of federal civil service protections and independent government operations."

...

Recruitment of young, highly skilled individuals for ideological projects is a hallmark of the neoreactionary movement. Musk, Thiel, and their networks have long championed youth-led companies and experiments, where teenagers and early-twenties recruits are given disproportionate power in government, technology, and finance.

This is evident in projects like:

● The Thiel Fellowship: Created by Peter Thiel in 2010, the fellowship encourages young talent to drop out of college and work on disruptive projects. Many recipients go on to work in surveillance, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency industries where Thiel has direct investments.

● The Network School & Stake: Created by Balaji Srinivasan, a major figure in the crypto and secessionist movements, forfeited his US citizenship to move to Singapore, and advocates for founder-led, one-commandment societies that operate independently of traditional nation-states (The Network State: How to Start a New Country.) Balaji launched the “Network School,” a three-month long program for “dark” talent. Prospective students were assessed based on their alignment with specific values, including the belief that Bitcoin can replace the U.S. dollar, and a preference for AI over traditional human judicial systems. No journalists were permitted, consistent with his philosophy to “Go direct. Build your own media.”

DOGE’s personnel structure mirrors the neoreactionary belief that governance should be placed in the hands of selected technological elites. These recruitment efforts follow a clear ideological objective: to remove experienced civil servants who uphold democratic norms and replace them with younger, unvetted ideologues who have been conditioned in neoreactionary circles. By deploying young, ideologically aligned individuals who lack experience in bureaucratic norms, legal constraints, or accountability structures, Musk and his allies are attempting to normalize rule by unelected elites.

This serves multiple purposes:

● It accelerates the collapse of traditional governance institutions by removing career expertise and replacing it with loyalty-based appointments.

● It erodes the very concept of democratic oversight, conditioning the next generation of tech elites to accept a post-political and post-democratic world where private networks control public infrastructure.

There is precedent for authoritarian regimes recruiting young, highly loyal cadres to execute radical ideological shifts. In Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution empowered young Red Guards to purge the bureaucracy and enforce party discipline. In Nazi Germany, Hitler Youth were fast-tracked into state security as a way to circumvent experienced officials who might resist authoritarian expansion.

In contemporary autocratic regimes, such as in Russia and China, young technocrats are cultivated early and shielded from democratic institutions to ensure loyalty to centralized leadership. Congress must urgently investigate:

● The extent to which private actors (such as Thiel, Srinivasan, and Musk) are coordinating youth recruitment pipelines into federal restructuring efforts.

● Whether DOGE personnel are engaged in efforts to establish alternative governance structures, “network states,” or private autocratic enclaves while holding U.S. government positions, potentially violating insurrection, sedition, or national security laws.

The latter point on potentially violating insurrection, sedition, and national security laws cannot be underestimated, given network state experiments in territories currently considered under annexation by the administration. Two prominent projects are Praxis and Prospera.

References

BILtalks, “BIL2012 - Mencius Moldbug: How to Reboot the US Government,” YouTube video, 18:30, posted October 20, 2012, https://youtube.com/ZluMysK2B1E (17:10–18:10)

Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Chapter 6: "The Lost Theory of Government," May 22, 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol6-lost-theory-of-government/

Mencius Moldbug, “Mediocracy: Definition, Etiology and Treatment,” Unqualified Reservations, September 9, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/mediocracy-definition-etiology-and/

Kevin Roose, “Slate Star Codex’s Rationalists,” The New York Times, February 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html

Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014)

Ronan Farrow, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule,” The New Yorker, August 28, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule

Linker, Damon. “The Intellectual Right Contemplates an ‘American Caesar’.” The Week, July 28, 2021. https://theweek.com/politics/1003035/the-far-right-contemplates-an-american-caesar

Curtis Yarvin, "The Trials of Trump," Gray Mirror, June 6, 2024.

James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets