The Bluestocking 373: Dark Elf and Madeley
people assume she’s a feminist when in fact she’s just a narcissist
Happy Friday!
This is your last chance to pre-order The Genius Myth. After next week, it’s just a normal order, and you don’t get the warm glow of satisfaction from being an early adopter.
Helen
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America (New Yorker, £)
Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life.
Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.
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There are approximately one zillion quotable lines in this profile of the “dark elf” of MAGA, Curtis Yarvin—the self-described reactionary who wants America to be a dictatorship, but with a group of (probably) airline pilots given a veto over the dictator’s actions. (Someone on X said, cruelly but accurately, that all Yarvin’s political suggestions sound like a kid describing his perfect Lego fort.) Yarvin is a big favourite of Peter Thiel and JD Vance. He encapsulates perfectly the tendency on that bit of the online right to be simultaneously very dangerous and very cringe.
My favourite scene is when they go and see Renaud Camus, the guy who popularised the idea of the “Great Replacement theory”, ie that elites are shipping in Muslims to Europe to replace the white population. You would think that Yarvin and Camus would bond over their shared interest in racism, but instead Yarvin decides to show off how much he knows about French history, before seguing into the internet conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron is transgender. “‘We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,’ Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. ‘What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?’”
Also, this account from his ex-girlfriend of Yarvin being a weird ignored kid seems like a good explanation for many of the people you see soiling themselves online: “[to her, it] seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of ‘repetition compulsion,’ a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality.”
Bluestocking recommends! London Centric has the best vegetable art from the Lambeth County Show, which seems this year to focus on two subjects: the use of Brockwell Park for private festivals, and the election of the Pope.
Quick Links
“What does it mean that our predominant fictional landscapes are all so undeniably ‘elevated,’ to use a word cribbed from the Duchess of Sussex? And Just Like That is evidence of how hard it is for shows that take wealth for granted to have narrative stakes, and how stultifying they become as a result.” Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic on how money ruined television (gift link)
“My wife once said that the principal issue with Atwood is that people assume she’s a feminist when in fact she’s just a narcissist—she only appears to care about “women” because she herself is one and her primary concern is herself.” I like Margaret Atwood a lot more than this author does, but I still enjoyed this brisk criticism of her work (Substack)
Remember WiSpa? The person involved was found Not Guilty (LA Mag).
In The Genius Myth, I mention a great 1922 paper called “Are Inventions Inevitable?” That paper sets out 150 examples of multiple discoveries, but it can’t work out how frequent such discoveries are, compared with individual inventions. Here, Substacker Brian Potter has a go.
“There is much to regret about the ways Elon Musk has changed Twitter. But there’s been one obvious change for the better: By rupturing the Twitter user base, he (accidentally?) created a firewall between the most maladjusted liberal posters on the internet and the reporters, Democratic politicians and operatives who used to pay an excessive amount of attention to their harangues.” Josh Barro welcomes Bluesky as a containment dome around neurotic anime communists (Substack).
Deborah Cameron on the language of the Musk/Trump breakup, and how it reveals the replacement of patriarchy with “‘fratriarchy’, a modern form of male dominance (aka “patriarchy”) which depends less on the absolute authority of fathers (over younger men as well as women) and more on the homosocial bonds men of similar status forge with each other.” (Deb UK)
On a related note, I really liked this piece on how Dems can get involved with the bro-caster circuit, but . . . I do think that these podcast formats being the most influential political forums in the US is terrible for female candidates. These guys don’t book women, and their audience don’t want to hear from women. I really enjoy doing (male dominated) panels and male-hosted podcasts but the comments/feedback are always incredibly hostile. You’re muscling into the fratriarchy and people don’t like it at all.
“Before intimacy coördinator was an IMDb credit, the task of putting actors at ease before sex scenes largely fell to directors. In 2007, during the filming of “Atonement,” Joe Wright played “Come to Me,” by Mark Lanegan and PJ Harvey, to set the mood before James McAvoy pinned Keira Knightley against a stack of library books—and then yelled, “Keira, wank him off!”” Pleasingly sceptical piece about the vogue for intimacy co-ordinators, which I’m sure sometimes prove useful, and other times prove to be a classic HR shield, ie making it harder for people to sue or complain (New Yorker, £).
It’s happened: I have lived long enough to see someone out-Madeley Richard Madeley (X)
See you next time! Last call for my events next week, including Bath with Sarah Ditum, and London with Armando Iannucci. There are links to book all the live events here.
In re Margaret Atwood, one of the things I do is run a creative writing group for survivors of torture (unique in the world, going for over 20 years). We used to send our work to the Edinburgh Festival to be read in the Amnesty Sessions, and in those days could sometimes afford to bring the writers to hear their work read, in public, to hundreds of people, by distinguished authors. A big, maybe once in a lifetime deal for people who'd been tortured and told, over and over again, that they were worthless. One year Margaret Atwood was there, to read one of our writers' pieces. Instead of going straight in, she spent fifteen minutes talking about Margaret Atwood and Amnesty, and how much she'd done for Amnesty, and what a big supporter she was of Amnesty. The result; another of our writers - also there, specially to witness this moment - had to experience her piece just being cut, because otherwise the session would have overrun. I'm afraid I have never forgiven this.
There’s been unrealistic prosperity in UK TV dramas for a good while too - everyone young and single - even teachers or coppers who aren’t that well off - lives in a nice flat (never a share), couples and families have gardens. The exception was a (very good) show from a few years’ ago about two young coppers, one lived in a horrible flatshare, the other was fed up to be still with his family. Think it was called New Blood - I think it’s stuck in my mind partly for the actually credible living circumstances.