On neoreactionarism.

Ironically, I’m going to let ChatGPT give the most succinct definition of neoreactionarism as our starting point:

Neoreactionarism (or neoreaction, NRx) is a political movement that rejects liberal democracy and egalitarianism, advocating for authoritarian or hierarchical forms of governance. It incorporates Silicon Valley start-up ideas by embracing a technocratic, innovation-driven mindset-favoring elite rule, efficiency, and disruptive change, much like how Silicon Valley values rapid experimentation, hierarchy, and the pursuit of transformative solutions. In essence, neoreactionarism blends far-right traditionalism with the entrepreneurial, elite-driven ethos of the tech industry.

I truly despise the New York Times, but I recently watched a video interview with Curtis Yarvin, aka the father of this political philosophy, published a few days before the Trump inauguration. It's one of the most important videos I’ve seen explaining the rapid steps the Trump administration has taken to install the President as a dictator, or, in Yarvin’s terms, a “national CEO” who aligns with the neoreactive movement and philosophy.

Yarvin advocates that it is easier and more efficient to replace an antiquated government system by building a new one, rather than fixing the existing one. In the video, he compares today’s NASA to that of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which he purports to be an example of a "monarchy" led by a single strong man CEO who commands a hierarchical power structure to maximize the value of his company. He uses this comparison and success of the latter as evidence that the SpaceX model is a significantly more efficient and modern approach to space exploration than the antiquated government agency. What Yarvin conveniently fails to mention is the chronic underfunding of NASA since the “gilded-age” of the moon race in the late 1960s, thus completely sidestepping the idea that a lack of resources is likely the root of its current ineffectiveness.

As someone who has worked in Silicon Valley, venture capital-backed companies like SpaceX for almost a decade, I’ve had a front row seat to the pioneering tests of this theory: rapidly creating and scaling brand new entities known as “startups”, to “disrupt” a market or industry by taking on and replacing an older incumbent dominating the space.

If you are unfamiliar with Silicon Valley, or the startup world generally, a really good example of this approach would be any number of Apple products that have taken on the existing producer of an existing technology, and built a ground-up new product to compete with and eventually replace it. You can look at the iPod versus mp3 players, or the iPhone and its disruption of mobile phone incumbents like Nokia and Motorola in the mid-2000s, as proof of this approach succeeding (at least in the eyes of Apple and its shareholders).

Notable examples of the “disruption” model explain why Yarvin’ school of thought has taken root with people like Marc Andreesson and Peter Thiel. These are billionaire startup founders and venture capitalists (VCs) who are financing the testing and implementation of these ideas on progressively larger scales, using their own wildly financially successful companies as self-reinforcing conceptual proof for the philosophy.

On a micro level, projects like Prospera—a ’”start-up city” in Honduras whose sovereignty is hotly contested—have been financed by mega billionaire VCs like Peter Thiel (Palantir), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz). Here they attempt to extrapolate their theory by trying to intentionally build brand new, utopian societies from scratch, with novel governance structures heavily reliant on the usage of modern-age technology like crypto, AI, and web3.

On a macro level, we are seeing Elon’s sweeping DOGE cuts (an obvious manifestation of Yarvin's concept of Retire All Government Employees, or RAGE for short) "disrupting" the federal government to replace it with something more efficient, also driven by modern technology. This is an even larger test to see if the hypothesized principals in the “start-up city” model can replace democracy, which they see as a failed and inefficient governance system.

So far, the outcomes have been less than ideal.

Now that we have a general sense of the origin of this rapidly spreading philosophy—especially among rich and powerful white men—let’s see where we can poke holes in their arguments.

They are allowing the outlier mass successes of “unicorn” companies like OpenAI or Palantir obfuscate the fact that 90% of startups fail.

If a startup company fails, the scope of the harm and damage done to those involved is usually contained to a relatively small number of people (although there are much more destructive examples like Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos that caused immense, outsized harm).

If a new, small techno-nation state fails, many more people will suffer, but especially the people on the margins of that society. They do not have the power and resources to mitigate the pain and suffering involved in a collapse and will be unable to transition to something else, unlike the billionaire elites who are buffered by their wealth and power.

However, if an existing nation state of 300M+ people fails, you can imagine how the magnitude of suffering (again, concentrated among populations with the least privilege) becomes astronomical.

The big problem here is that neoreactionarism overvalues the outliers in these experiments. While 90% of startups fail, only ~1% become billion dollar “unicorns” like Palantir. Even with such limited supporting evidence, there are simultaneous, ongoing tests of the theory happening on much larger scales that could have enormous negative consequences for millions of people.

They falsely assume that the success of the majority of existing CEOs is completely attributable to the exceptional capabilities of that person.

I have known a lot of startup CEOs (good and bad), and I strongly believe that there is a massive, self-reinforcing delusion about their own capabilities that is absolutely steeped in hubris. However, this common delusion begins to break down when you think critically about the demographics and lived experiences of successful CEOs.

I think there are two competing explanations for why most top CEOs are white men, and especially younger white men with little-to-no business experience seen frequently in Silicon Valley:

1. Yarvin’s world-view that white men are simply intellectually and evolutionarily superior to other classes of people, predisposed to be successful leaders, while groups like women and people of colour are predisposed to support them through the means of biological reproduction or capitalist labour.

It’s here that it becomes clear how his theories rely on borrowed, dangerous ideas from fascism, neo-nazism, and white nationalism such as scientific racism. This is why I believe we see smart, educated conservatives willingly align themselves with deranged MAGA cultists, or militia groups like the Proud Boys.

2. The progressive world-view that historical patriarchal power structures were established by white men through violent colonialism, and that these men work to maintain and further accumulate this self-beneficial power over generations, often by any means necessary.

I think that transgender women (especially white women like myself) are strong supporting evidence of the second explanation. We are born into the world with the ultimate privilege of masculinity (this is a gross oversimplification of our experiences as trans women, and is often weaponized as the false concept of “male socialization” to invalidate our womanhood), but “voluntarily” give it away, dissolving the facade of total masculine superiority.

If you agree to establish the fact that transness is a real phenomenon (which I'd argue is indisputable, as human history is full of examples of gender diversity around the world), it begs the question as to why a trans person like myself would feel pain and discomfort (which we call “gender dysphoria”) that is so severe that I’ve sought relief via extensive and expensive life-saving, gender affirming medical care.

A core goal of neoreactionarism as described by Yarvin is propagating the genes of humans who fit into the rigid model of his imaginary utopia, even through extreme means like eugenics. He argues that these desirable people would thrive in a patriarchal world that aligns with an antiquated, rigid, and traditionally conservative social order. He goes further to say that humans have an intrinsic instinct to procreate, as seen in cis heteronormative society generally. If you do not have this instinct, whether you are trans or cis, you represent a glitch in the system.

I am a trans woman who never had and never will have the instinctual urge to procreate. My recent vaginoplasty fully sterilized me, removing my ability entirely. According to Yarvinism, this negates the value of my womanhood, and transsexuals like me become a very inconvenient truth to contend with.

I think this is also one reason that trans women are targeted by supposedly leftist, "radical" movements like trans exclusionary radical feminism (TERF-ism). If the broader definition of woman can include women like me who can’t reproduce, and in the eyes of the patriarchy reproduction is the principal value of women in society, we threaten the dominant version of cishet womanhood that benefits from the proximal protection of cishet masculinity. Cis heterosexual (especially white) women are afforded this luxury because of their value as reproductive tools, and even though they too suffer under the oppression of patriarchy, that protection provides a degree of relief.

The fact that the majority of notable TERFs are heterosexual white women supports this. It is a fact that 53% of American white women voted for a convicted rapist to be President. That same man is dismantling very hard-won and widely beneficial women's rights, such as the right to bodily and social autonomy, including abortion and the right to vote. I find the continued support of Donald Trump by these women inexplicable without considering their status as the second most powerful demographic in the country.

Secondly, through the sudden loss of cis masculine power, we trans women have an incredibly unique understanding of the oppression of all women under a patriarchal society. I'd argue that such a deep understanding is impossible to explain to a cis man in a way that would establish true and genuine empathy for all women.

I was scaling my first startup company as Director of Operations and managing a large team split between two states when I began my transition and started working full-time as Grace. Because of this, many of my colleagues up until that point knew me both from before and after coming out. I worked in industrial drone technology, and would routinely have to interact with cis men in the overwhelmingly male defense and aviation industries (think Lockheed Martin and General Atomics). The difference in respect that I received from these men prior to my coming out and after was so depressingly stark and shocking that it was hard to believe.

I remember hosting a booth at a drone conference in Chicago where a man I knew pre-transition initially failed to make the connection between Aaron and Grace. Rather than the man-to-man respect as business colleagues I received before as an executive of the company, this man assumed I was a secretary and asked me to schedule a meeting with my former self.

Maybe a bit of an ego boost here, but I’m of the mind that if we actually spoke to trans women about their perspectives and these lived experiences that highlight the inequalities of societal privilege and power—rather than trying to systematically eliminate us—we just might be able to expand our collective capacity for empathy.

I’m not asking for us to elect a trans woman president (especially not a clinically insane one like me), but I think it’s worth even the most feeble attempt to hear us out, considering how absolutely fucked everything is!

This leads nicely into my final point.

Neoreactionists seem to be completely fine with creating mass casualties out of oppressed people for the eventual “greater good” of their imagined, future utopias.

It is a far easier hand-waving exercise to ignore the suffering of the most marginalized people when you’ve never consciously experienced patriarchal oppression for the first time like I have.

The analogy I use to try to express this experience to cis people is that it’s circularly impossible to describe the colour yellow to someone who has never seen in colour. I can’t explain yellow by saying that a school bus is yellow, since you’ve never seen the colour of a school bus. I can’t explain yellow by saying it’s a combination of green and blue, because you don’t have a conception of those either.

It makes me feel better to tell myself that I was a perfect feminist while I masqueraded as a man—definitely not like those other misogynistic and sexist men who treated women terribly. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there were a million opportunities where I should have used my masculine power to stand up for women.

By the time I was fully able to empathize with women—once I became free to live my life and be treated in society as one—my voice no longer held the same persuasive power to make the world a more equitable place. This is a catch-22 that I’ve yet to be able to think my way out of.

TL;DR that was a lot of words to try and say the following:

I believe neoreactionarism, Yarvinism, “the dark enlightenment”, or whatever you want to call it, is a political replacement theory based on a lack of empathy for people suffering most under our democracy. My alignment with its principals start and end with the shared idea that democracy is a flawed system that does not benefit everyone. Fundamentally though, I have a moral opposition to the myth of white, cisheteronormative, patriarchal superiority upon which this theory is built.

I believe there is strong evidence that this fringe theory has become a mainstream philosophy of the alt-right that currently has a stranglehold on American democracy, as evidenced by supporters like the Vice President and startup VC mega billionaire GOP donors that helped put him and his colleagues in power, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesson.

I believe, based on my decade working in the Silicon Valley ecosystem—both while pretending to be a cis man, and living as an out trans woman—that the theory breaks down due to 3 flawed assumptions:

1. Replacing the government with startups will succeed because a very small number of them are wildly successful, ignoring that the vast majority of startups are failures.
2. CEOs (predominately white, cis, straight men) are exceptional human beings genetically predisposed to success, rather than people who got extremely lucky and/or benefited from their various powers-assigned-at-birth.
3. Marginalized people and their wellbeing are disposable in the short-term in order to build a fantasy utopia prioritizing the greater good, an idea rooted in an embarrassing lack of empathy for the lives and experiences of the oppressed.

Obviously, I think NRx is bad praxis, not just because the theory seems to be rapidly manifesting as state-sanctioned violence and genocide against me as a trans woman. Ironically though, I think trans women have a unique ability to exemplify the movement's systematic shortcomings, as we can empathize with people oppressed in other ways due to a deeply personal understanding of the mechanics of power and privilege.

So what do we do about it?

The simplest answer is that we fight tooth and nail to uphold our democratic institutions, respect the rule of law and due process, and build bridges across ideological lines to realize that we’ve been lied to about the war between the left and the right.

It’s always been us versus the billionaires, and the sooner we collectively realize that, the quicker we can clean up this mess before it gets completely out of hand.