Storming the Cathedral: Curtis Yarvin

You come from a Jewish background but often write with striking distance from the liberal Jewish mainstream. How has Judaism—culturally, historically, or metaphysically—influenced your view of power, history, and sovereignty?

Because my Jewish grandparents were doctrinaire communists, they tried to eradicate every trace of Jewish religion or tradition from their lives. To them it was all superstition. Marx was their god and Stalin was his prophet. I am told that my grandfather, near the end of his life, reverted to some religious ideas, but I did not see it and find it hard to imagine.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no denying that the ‘Jewish revolutionary temperament’ is a thing. Whether it is cultural or biological, science has no way of telling. Since Judaism is both a religion and a race, does it matter?

From an early age, I was amused by the name of the Mexican ruling party, the PRI—”party of the institutional revolution.” The Jewish revolutionary temperament is one of many ingredients which has no choice but to turn against its own institutions, even when these institutions were created by revolutions no less radical. They have aged into orthodoxies—now, it is their turn.

Nevertheless, I insist, the ultimate revolution is to step off this wheel of samsara and actually establish a regime, or network of regimes, that can live forever. The last revolution is when no more revolutions are needed. Every revolutionary dreams of this—how many achieve it?

You coined the term “Cathedral” to describe the modern West’s informal oligarchy—media, universities, bureaucracies. Where does this structure stand in 2025, and is there still any credible counter-elite in the West?

It is amazing to see my own alma mater, Brown, bend the knee, and agree to stop using race in admissions—and report every year to Donald Trump how well it’s doing about that. It is like watching Mongol horsemen ride in triumph through Baghdad. It’s not just that these bowlegged orcs savages don’t know how to read. Do they even know what reading is? Yet here are our most holy mullahs, bending down before them.

Most are saddened by this sight. Not me. I always thought academia needed an enema. It’s great to see the Khan’s warriors in the street, savage as they are. The problem is: this is just a raid. We need the whole horde to come back and really sack the place. And they won’t.

The Cathedral today stands almost entirely intact. Nothing seriously threatens it. Actually, the mild attacks it has experienced will probably do it a service, by stripping it of an embarrassment: late 20th-century race communism.

Here is the dirty secret of campus race politics: it isn’t actually about race. No one cares about ‘black conservatives.’ There is nothing ‘historic’ about Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

The point of ‘affirmative action’ is that it oversamples ideology. Race communism (communism, but with the workers and peasants replaced by people of color) is the central ideology of the Cathedral, and always has been. The word ‘progressive’ has been used in the same way for a century, from the Old Left to the New Left. Say ‘racial progressivism,’ and a progressive might even agree.

The real purpose of the admissions officers is to maintain ideological and political hegemony. This is hardly hard—most peoples’ instinct is normally to support the powers that be. But it’s always best to keep power in shape.

Without the ability to stack the political deck by using race as a proxy, the commissars will just have to select even harder for more hardcore communism itself. Here we see, for instance, sexual minorities taking the front seat over racial minorities.

Just as race communism beat out class communism, the future belongs to sex communism. And even sex communism is only a stepping stone to the final stage of communism: death communism. ‘Voluntary human extinction.’

America is the great death-continent, as D.H. Lawrence said. The final stage of American communism can only be voluntary human extinction—also the obvious endpoint of environmentalism. Nothing in the 20th century was so much before its time as the People’s Temple—and the whole world will be our Guyana. And its high altar will be, as it always has been, in Harvard.

What is the selective force that makes more and more awful ideas evolve in the Cathedral’s cauldron? It is simple—power without accountability. Absolute power does not corrupt. Absolute power is great, actually. Unaccountable power always corrupts, though. It optimizes for ‘luxury ideas’—ideas that feel appealing, regardless of their performance.

Until there is a single source of truth ready to replace the press, the universities, or both, in information prestige, there is absolutely no way to fix the Cathedral. It must be disempowered, which means that whatever regime wishes to be rid of it needs some replacement organ. In 2025, there is nothing close. Actually, not only is there nothing close, there is nothing which comes close to even being close to being close. Sorry.

Your political outlook is often labeled ‘reactionary.’ What does ‘reaction’ mean to you—not as a slur, but as a political-philosophical position? Which thinkers or traditions have shaped your view of neoreaction? And, apart from yourself, who are the most interesting or serious voices in this space today?

Reaction is the return of past political systems. It is ‘neoreaction’ if it has no direct cultural link to the past—if it is reconstructed from old books, not transmitted through living teachers.

Joseph de Maistre is perhaps the original neoreactionary, because he was trained as an Enlightenment philosophe, and then rejected the doctrines of that revolution. Because neoreaction is disconnected from the vatic voice of tradition, it tends to rethink the world from first principles. This gives it a nerdy character, which has its pros and cons.

‘Voices’ in this sense means “faces,” I’m afraid. All the really interesting voices are anonymous. Just look at who I retweet. They are almost all anonymous—mysterious, whimsical names. It is not unusual for me to meet a man in real life, make friends with him, and not know his name. The game is the game.

There is really nothing in neoreaction that is not in Maistre. But it is also good to remember the words of Paul Kruger, one of reaction’s great practitioners: “Take what was good about the past, and use it to build the future.”

It is important to never use the word ‘reactionary’ when you actually mean “reactive.” I see this more and more in my clinic. It is caused by microplastics in the frontal cortex. If you find yourself doing this, call your doctor. He may be able to cure you with magnets.

You’ve written about the decline of the American republic and proposed a “Caesarist alternative”—order without democracy. What would such a post-democratic future look like—and who could be a legitimate Caesar?

The post-democratic future is also the most democratic future. In the most democratic future, the people have as much power as possible. They have as much power as possible, because their power is as voters in a representative democracy. Therefore, their representatives have as much power as possible. Clearly, power is maximized by electing a single leader with absolute authority. The most democratic system is an elected dictatorship. Moreover—the longer the term this dictatorship is elected for, the more powerful the election.

Legally, it is true, no President has any authority over many significant arms of the American regime. State governments. Nonprofits. Universities. Banks. Newspapers. Schools. But—come on. This is FDR’s empire. We just live in it.

Once the President exercises unconditional executive authority over the executive branch—dissolving, creating, or restructuring agencies as he sees fit—there is no inertia that can resist him. Picture DOGE times a hundred.

What will happen to California? Some admin guy will go to Sacramento and demand root on all the servers. Thereupon, he will be the viceroy of California. End of story. Also, in the future, America will have one DMV—and it will be smaller than any of the 50 DMVs that exist today. What will happen to Skull and Bones? Six hours after the inauguration, the Secret Service seizes its secret clubhouse and all its ancient records. Maybe there’s nothing there! I don’t know, that’d be funny too.

Who is the leader? There are probably 10,000 Americans that could do the job. Management experience is required—as is cultural literacy in all major American cultures, ‘red’ or ‘blue,’ ‘white’ or ‘black.’

I don’t know if this seems basic. The problem is pretty basic. It’s the same problem faced by the American administration in Germany in 1945. Then, everything was Nazi. Now, everything is communist. The prerequisite for solving the problem is the same: absolute power.

In the American system, the best way to capture absolute power is to capture both the Presidency and the Congress. To capture the Hill, I have another catchy slogan: RACE. Replace All Congressional Employees: both politicians and staff. We can keep a few of these fossils around on contract to show us how the old machine works. As for the rest, they probably never wanted to be inner-city educators. That doesn’t mean they won’t be good at it, though.

Under the American constitution as it is today, a President is not the President until he becomes the master of Congress. If Trump thinks he is the master of Congress, why are they delaying all his nominees? LOL. We have come a long way—but we have much, much further to go.

Many young dissidents see you as a postmodern monarchist or political alchemist. Do you write for future rulers—or for rebels?

I write only the truth as I see it—and only for the future. As for rebels—if they do not see themselves as rulers, they will certainly be hanged. Otherwise, they will probably be hanged.

After Israel’s recent preemptive strike on Iran, the West remained largely silent. Who still protects Western civilization today—and who threatens it most? Can a second Trump presidency change that—or has the West’s geopolitical center shifted permanently?

There are no external threats to Western civilization. There is no other civilization. Even Chinese civilization is fundamentally Western. In fact, even Iranian civilization is fundamentally Western, although with some interesting non-Western cultural admixture. In China—little is left but the language, the character set, and the DNA.

So much of the age of revolution purported to be non-Western or anti-Western, when it was just a layer of premodern kitsch on top of a Western revolutionary tradition. The Ayatollah was installed by the Western Left. The Iranian Revolution reminds us more of Conrad’s Secret Agent than the Prophet and his companions. All these falsities are ebbing away as even Iran succumbs to ‘Westoxification.’

When you spoke in Banja Luka in June of 2025, the atmosphere was tense, but still marked by a kind of resilient dignity. Since then, the elected president of Republika Srpska [Milorad Dodik] has been sentenced to prison—not for breaking any BiH law, but for defying a decree by the High Representative, a foreign official without democratic legitimacy. What did you learn from your time in Republika Srpska—and what do small nations like this reveal about political survival in a world shaped by abstract norms and imperial habits? [Editor’s note: Dodik’s sentence was later converted to a fine. In October, the Trump administration lifted all U.S. sanctions against Dodik, members of his cabinet, and senior officials of the government.]

The ghosts of the 20th century are still barely alive in Bosnia. But everywhere, the political energy has dropped by orders of magnitude. Doubtless even the violence in Yugoslavia in the 1990s seemed casual and desultory by the standards of the 1940s. Both the energy of hegemony, and the energy of independence, are historically feeble today—but they remain, somehow, evenly matched.

The essence of 21st-century politics is that almost no one cares almost at all about almost anything at all. This depoliticization allows the ultimate debasement of nations: population replacement. No student of 19th-century democracy could understand how cavalierly the 21st-century electorates have permitted replacement migration by unrelated populations—especially in countries like Ireland, where this humiliation is the inevitable, yet puzzling, culmination of a quarter-millennium of proud Irish nationalism.

The definitive objective question of a nation’s status in this degringolade is the ‘McDonald’s test’—are food service workers natives of the country, or imported helots? Once the switch to a helot economy is complete, nationalism is impossible. How much political energy does it take to resist this? Not much—but not much is available.

The High Representative’s powers over Bosnia and Herzegovina—including Republika Srpska—have been called a legal ghost from the 1990s. He can remove elected leaders, impose laws, and now even trigger prison sentences—without ever facing a vote. You’ve described this model as a “post-imperial anachronism.” What does it reveal about the Western system’s deeper assumptions—about legitimacy, sovereignty, and the right to rule?

The end of the old European order was the extension of English colonial ideas, not just the classic imperialism of trade and domination, but the missionary imperialism of soft power and human rights, to the Western world itself. It should not be forgotten that Kipling’s “Lesser breeds, without the law” were the Germans, and there are plenty of echoes of colonialism in a document like JCS 1067, the Allied directive for the occupation of Germany.

In a way, Europe was the last place where these elements of hard power were acceptable. When the EU received a colonial mandate to rule over the white savages of Bosnia, it seemed almost natural. No one would try this with Irishmen, who are really persons of color, but Serbs? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But the test of a legacy system is always whether, if it did not exist, anyone would invent it. And clearly, by this standard, the last remnants of European colonialism in Europe feel like an anachronism.

Europe’s Right still seems culturally fragmented: traditionalists, libertarians, post-liberals. Do you think any broad coalition—‘uniting the Right’—is even possible or useful? Or must a new force emerge that transcends these ideological distinctions altogether?

Europe’s Right is a very different phenomenon from America’s Right, because Right is just the absence of Left.

In both Europe and America, almost everything is Left. But the exceptions are very different. In Europe, there is the living memory of a prewar conservative aristocracy. In France and Germany, these societies and networks are too deeply rooted to be eliminated, even after almost a century of American hard and soft domination.

America has no native rightist aristocracy, except the remnants of the Old South—and even before World War II, there was little left of the old Southern planter-aristocrat. The (literal) ‘white-supremacist’ politicians of the Jim Crow era were Scots-Irish crackers, not Cavalier planters. Anyone with heritage in a strange alternative American aristocracy—Mormons are a good example—is especially likely to cozy up to the dominant elite, not rebel against it. If you are some descendant of Brigham Young, born to be a prince of the Church, you make it your mission to go to Harvard, return, and help bring Mormonism into the modern world. —With more gay marriage or whatever.

Everything else is Harvard. Everything else is New England. And despite its moments of accidental conservatism, New England has since the day of its foundation been a fundamentally left-wing regime. It is not difficult to recognize the Puritans as the original revolutionaries. Of course, every successful revolution creates a revolutionary establishment, which then becomes more establishment than revolutionary. But its ideological and cultural DNA is unchanged, and keeps creating new ‘great awakenings’ among new generations.

So the cultural problem of ‘uniting the Right’ is very different in Europe than in America. In Europe, it means uniting the populist opposition with its natural leaders in the upper class, its intellectual elite in the online Right, and its economic elite in the business class, including substantial amounts of multigenerational wealth. In America, since there is no right-wing upper class, all we have is the populist Right and various flavors of elite Right—and various elite potential donors, typically all with first-generation wealth.

In America, the new Right needs to be invented. In Europe, it only needs to be restored. Which is harder is hard to tell.

What is certain is that the old ‘uniparty,’ ‘neocon,’ or ‘fusionist’ postwar Right has, both in Europe and America, been firmly consigned to legacy status.

Fusionism is the COBOL of the Right. While it will live as long as its believers live, it is hard to imagine it making new converts. Even converts from the Left will go directly to the new Right.

Israel’s travails keep neoconnery alive in America, unfortunately—both nations, for their own internal political needs, need to find a way to “detox” (as Netanyahu has literally called it) from each other. At least in the medium term, Israel does not need and should not accept American funding or weapons. But detox is never easy.

You’ve argued that legitimacy today must come not from elections, but from competence and sovereignty. Could European elites ever embrace such a shift, or must new elites be built from scratch?

‘Elite’ means two different things: functional, and social. Functional elites are effective through their work. Social elites are effective through their social leadership.

The standard way of building new functional elites is just to hire them into a functioning command hierarchy—that is, a monarchy.

This is not just Napoleon’s “career open to talents,” but also Louis XIV’s intendant system. Arguably some training helps. But fundamentally, government is a generalist job and takes people with generalist skills. Just hire smart, energetic, sensible young people. It actually helps if they don’t know anything—this lets them realize that they have to learn. The more they know about the old way of governing, the worse, except inasmuch as they have to understand it to shut it down.

We normally think about creating a new functional elite because we are used to oligarchical systems of government, in which power devolves on a new elite with the confidence and capacity to rule. The problem is that while history has seen oligarchies capture power from both monarchies and democracies, there are no examples of one oligarchy outcompeting another.

It is hard to even imagine how this would work. Are the new elites pretending to be members of the old elite, and infiltrating ‘in the closet’? Or are they openly hostile? If the former, how and when do they come out? To eliminate just-world bias, try to imagine a very ambitious and well-organized Church of Scientology pulling this off. It’s hard.

Once we understand that—recruiting people, even collecting people, is good. Rich people should collect art and people, but mainly people. But this is not to be confused with a Gramscian “long march through the institutions,” because apolitical institutions can only be politicized once. Scientology could not infiltrate the liberal 21st-century state, because it was already infiltrated in the 20th century—and the existing oligarchy that inhabits this shell, like the crab in a snail shell, understands infiltration.

The most important function of a new elite is not political, but social—not staffing the new regime, but exceeding the old elite by being better and more impressive. The new elite that the Western world needs now is not a new army of bureaucrats, but a new society of aristocrats.

Silicon Valley once symbolized innovation and disruption. Today it often enforces ideological conformity. Do you think there is such a thing as a tech Right—and, if so, how could it be better mobilized to achieve actual power?

Ironically, what is missing in the ‘tech Right’ is not money or intelligence. It is ambition and self-confidence.

The lowest rank of ambition and self-confidence is complete submission—‘idiocy’ in the ancient Greek sense. In the Third World, the public sphere is chaos, filth, and insanity, but within a wealthy private house everything is peaceful and ordered. Similarly, inside a tech company, decisions flow from top to bottom and the whole company acts as a single individual. This separation between private order and public chaos is taken for granted. The CEO believes in a public narrative which completely contradicts his entire daily life. After his ‘exit,’ he will be lauded publicly for pouring his private wealth into the institutions which pretend to cope with the public chaos, but actually create it.

90% percent of successful people in tech are this way. Of course, they enthusiastically complied with the prototype total state of the early 2020s. That total state will be back, and they will comply with it again.

Ten years ago, this percentage was more like 98%. Things are changing. But when we look at the leaders rather than the followers, we are still behind.

The essential problem with the ‘tech Right’ is that it doesn’t exist. It appears to exist. The press reports that it exists. But the press, which understands and is an essential part of liberal society, is projecting its own self-understanding onto a world it does not understand.

Liberals, having screwed up everything they touch, believe they have a right to rule and a cure for all of society’s ills. Therefore, their sense of acting along with this power is natural and unconscious. They do not think in terms of ‘power.’ They think in terms of ‘impact.’ It makes them feel good to do the right thing, so they do it.

Conservatives and especially libertarians do not think in terms of ‘power,’ either. But nor do they have any visceral sense of ‘impact.’ Rather, to them, philanthropy is what it pretends to be—supporting good things that are worth supporting for their own sake. (This is different from literal political contributions, which are a totally separate concept in the conservative mind.)

The good feeling that liberals get from philanthropy is the feeling of leadership—of standing at the head of an army of clients. Conservatives do not believe in clients. Conservatives believe in real issues, projects, and plans. Conservatives are libertarians, and owning human beings is literally the worst sin that a libertarian can imagine. Who has the right to do that? No one, obviously.

From DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance), the modern Left seems animated by religious fervor—salvation through diversity, sin through history, heresy through dissent. Has liberalism become a secular religion—and how do we fight it without becoming fundamentalists ourselves?

Liberalism has always been a religion. It is not a metaphor for a religion. It is a specific religion. Liberalism is ‘mainline Protestantism,’ the Protestantism of the New England elite, the Protestantism of Harvard. This faith has gone by many names over the past four centuries: Calvinist, Independent, Brownist, Congregationalist, Dissenter, and so on. ‘Unitarian’ is a good word.

The disappearance of magical theology from Unitarian Protestantism does not make it any less a religion, unless your definition of ‘religion’ is fundamentally theological. For theists, this is perhaps apt. But for atheists, such as myself, who do not believe in magical theology, the concept of ‘religion’ is fundamentally historical or, if we must, ‘sociological.’

The nature and function of a tradition is best explained not by its magical beliefs, which may change over time, or may even not exist. Confucianism in China is a tradition, although supernatural magic is not an element of this tradition. Like languages or DNA, traditions or ‘folkways’ are passed down ‘genetically’—we can trace them from parent to child, from teacher to student. They are, of course, at the center of politics.

Understanding our leading tradition—for mainline Protestantism is, and has always been, the leitkultur of America—from the outside, as if we did not believe in it or even grow up believing in it, is an essential aspect of understanding the world we live in as rational beings. Imagine if our leitkultur was Islam, not Protestantism. To grow up as a Muslim, then understand Islam as just another ‘religion,’ is a mental step that most human beings will never be capable of taking. To understand that liberalism is ‘like’ a religion is a big step, but to understand that this is not a simile at all, but a statement of historical fact, is a much bigger historical step.

An absence of faith is not a faith. To study a negative category as a positive category is a logical mistake. When we stop believing in Unitarianism, we can believe in anything—from Buddhism to Nazism. The study of ‘non-Unitarianism’ is not a study. Imagine if the whole world was Jewish, and its universities had departments of “Gentile Studies” that tried to find the patterns among Buddhism, Islam, Nazism, etc., etc., under the label of ‘Gentilism.’ There is no ‘Gentilism’ and there never could be, even if the whole world was Jewish.

Many dissidents today weaponize irony, memes, and satire. What is the role of humor in resisting ideological orthodoxy—and where does mockery succeed where arguments fail?

Mockery succeeds because the important task is not creating a new faith, but disenchanting the world from an old faith.

Do people need faith to unite their positive actions? Maybe. Certainly, action with deep and sustained conviction requires deep faith.

But the people who overthrew the Soviet Union did not have any deep faith. They acted not positively out of faith, but negatively out of an absence of faith. They had lost faith in Marxist-Leninism—one of many 20th-century faiths rooted in 19th-century English liberalism. Perhaps they had a ‘fundamentalism’ faith in restoring leftism to its Western roots,

Negative action is different from positive action. To build a new thing, everyone has to agree on what they are building, and act with deep and sustained conviction to build it. To tear down an old thing, everyone has to say ‘no’ at the same time, and there has to be a machine that integrates this ‘great no’ into a single collective action. Less building the State of Israel—more ‘storm area 51’”

Like the late Romans, we live in a faithless age. Monarchy suited the earliest Romans, but the early Roman kings were spiritual leaders of a deeply religious society. This society became the greatest oligarchical republic in history. But when Roman faith and the Roman tradition died, to be replaced by a hedonistic, materialistic society, monarchy was needed again. While every society is historically unique, ours shows distinct resemblances to the Roman Empire—definitely not the early Rome of the Etruscan kings, and definitely not the old Republic of Regulus or Cincinnatus.

When we larp the Founders, we are pretending that our future is a return to our republican past. The most extreme conservatives imagine a return to early, vital paganism. Rome, of course, later returned to religion—but it would have perished, not just as a republic but as a country, without the Caesars. For everything has its time. Caesar himself was a great wit, and completely unsuperstitious. The old Roman traditions had become jokes—and to refuse to take them seriously, while taking reality itself completely seriously, was the formula for the future.

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This essay appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 37:20-21.