The New Right — Yarvin, Thiel and a Thousand-Page Programme

I. The Word Revolution

Whoever hears “revolution” thinks of the Bastille, of red flags, of 1968. In our imagination revolution means liberation and progress, and it comes from the left. The French historian Hamit Bozarslan, director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, considers this a gap in our memory. In his book “Walpurgis. Les révolutions de droite”, published in spring 2026, he recalls that Marx and Engels regarded Bismarck as a revolutionary and that fascism and National Socialism understood themselves as revolutions. The publisher quotes Raymond Aron, who wrote as early as the 1930s that the revolutions of his century were not revolutions of liberation but of authority.

The publisher sums up what these right-wing revolutions have in common: self-made myths, history as a conspiracy to be averted, the primacy of the biological over the social, the cult of power, a leader as the source of all legitimacy. In an interview with “Le Figaro” in September 2026, Bozarslan draws the line into the present. Today in the United States, figures such as Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel continue this tradition in a futuristic form. Technological progress, the headline says, is to produce a new aristocracy. The German newspaper “Die Welt” republished the interview and quotes him: “We are witnessing the end of the idea of the citizen.” The rest of the conversation is behind a paywall. We therefore test the thesis against what can be documented.

II. The Teacher and His Pupil

We introduced Peter Thiel in “The Stone That Looks Back”: co-founder of PayPal, early backer of Facebook, chairman of Palantir, patron of J.D. Vance. Here his teacher is of interest. At Stanford Thiel encountered the French cultural theorist René Girard and has since called himself a “hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian”. In the mid-2000s he founded, with the theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the Imitatio foundation, which promotes Girard’s work.

Girard’s basic idea is simple and uncomfortable. People do not desire from within themselves, but because others desire. Whoever wants the same as his neighbour becomes his rival, the rivalry grows, and in the end communities discharge it on a scapegoat whom everyone believes guilty. The Gospels, according to Girard, tell this story for the first time from the victim’s point of view and show that the victim was innocent. For him that is the way out: to see through the mechanism.

Thiel made something else of the same teaching. He called Facebook, as the “New York Times” obituary of Girard quotes him, “doubly mimetic”: a network in which everyone sees what the others want. And in his book “Zero to One” he writes: “Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.” His conclusion: whoever is clever does not compete but creates a monopoly. He escapes the crowd instead of enlightening it.

In “The Mimetic Society” we used Girard to criticise the elites: what is modelled at the top is imitated by everyone below. Thiel reads the same Girard and concludes that the gifted must rise above imitation. The same thinker, two opposite conclusions. Girard wanted to expose the mechanism that produces scapegoats. In Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist, which he has been giving since 2025, those who warn of the risks of technology become “legionnaires of the Antichrist”. The Girard scholar Nidesh Lawtoo calls Thiel’s use of the theory, in the journal “Esprit”, intellectually problematic and politically misleading. One need not share that view to notice the reversal: whoever warns is made the scapegoat. In “The Unheard and Forgotten Voices in the Wilderness” we described how hard warners have it anyway. Here they receive a theological label on top.

III. The King’s Engineer

We introduced Curtis Yarvin at length in “The Engineers of Absolutism”: the programmer who blogged as “Mencius Moldbug” from 2007 to 2014, the “Cathedral” of universities and leading media, the state as a joint-stock company with a chief executive whom the “New York Times” drily calls his friendlier term for a dictator. That essay also traces the lineage that leads from the Technocracy movement of the 1930s via Ayn Rand to the “Dark Enlightenment”. Bozarslan’s line is a different one, but it ends with the same names.

What is new is how widely Yarvin is now heard. J.D. Vance said in a podcast in 2021: “There’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin … I’m sympathetic to that project.” One should fire every mid-level bureaucrat and replace them with “our people”. In the same year Yarvin spoke with Michael Anton, later head of policy planning at the State Department, about an “American Caesar” crossing the Rubicon. After the 2025 inauguration the “Washington Post” reported that advisers to the cost-cutting body DOGE had called Yarvin “the brain”, though anonymously. Yarvin himself mocked DOGE as an orchestra of chimpanzees trying to perform Wagner. Whoever brings engineers to power ends up with enforcers. We described this in “Technocracy and Its Vassalage”.

His critics take him seriously, but not as a thinker. The philosopher Antón Barba-Kay writes that Yarvin is consequential, “but not on account of his body of thought”. His notions do not bear close scrutiny, and he does not seem to mean them to. His effect lies in provocation, not in argument.

IV. The Programme

The thousand-page programme exists twice. The first is Yarvin’s blog, some thousand pages of ideas. The second is their tool. In April 2023 the Heritage Foundation presented “Mandate for Leadership”, known as “Project 2025”: some nine hundred pages, edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves, eventually backed by more than a hundred organisations. It is a handbook for taking over the government from day one. The Department of Education “should be eliminated”. Officials in policy-related posts should be dismissible at any time. In the foreword Heritage president Kevin Roberts writes that the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions” has come to pass. That is the slogan of 1968, turned around. In July 2024 he said America was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

During the campaign Trump declared: “I know nothing about Project 2025.” Since 2025 much of it has become reality. Russ Vought, one of the authors, again heads the budget office. Since March 2026 a rule has been in force under which officials in policy-related posts can be dismissed without the usual appeal rights. In 2025 some 317,000 employees left federal service. The tasks of the Department of Education have been distributed to other departments, even though Congress has not abolished it. At the end of June 2026 the Supreme Court ruled six to three that the president may dismiss the heads of independent agencies at will. They are “envoys of the President, not his equals”. A private tracker counts that by summer 2026 about two fifths of the objectives had been implemented.

V. The Tribune of the People

Someone else stated the goal early. In February 2017, then chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon promised at the conservative conference CPAC the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Kevin Roberts proclaimed his “second American Revolution” on Bannon’s show “War Room”. Bannon is the man for the masses: a podcaster who mobilises daily, who spent four months in prison in 2024 for contempt of Congress and who pleaded guilty in 2025 in the fraud case over donations for the border wall.

And he despises the tech billionaires. He calls them “technofeudalists”. In January 2025 he called Musk “a truly evil person” whose only goal was to become a trillionaire. The dispute was sparked by work visas for foreign engineers, which Silicon Valley wants and Bannon’s followers reject. So the New Right has two wings. One mobilises the people against the state. The other wants to take over the state, but for itself, not for the people. They need each other and do not trust each other. The right-wing revolutions Bozarslan examines also came to power through such an alliance. In 1933 conservative elites brought Hitler into office because they believed they could steer him.

VI. The Sabbath Comes to Europe

Bannon’s first attempt to reach Europe failed. His “Movement”, launched in Brussels in 2018, was meant to unite the continent’s right-wing populist parties and stalled at three members. The second attempt came with the power of government. In February 2025 Vice President Vance said at the Munich Security Conference that the greatest danger to Europe was not Russia or China but “the threat from within”, and: “There’s no room for firewalls.” Afterwards he met Alice Weidel of the AfD. The US National Security Strategy of December 2025 speaks of the prospect of Europe’s “civilizational erasure”, welcomes the growing influence of “patriotic European parties” and announces “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” within European nations. A few weeks later Secretary of State Rubio imposed entry bans on former EU commissioner Thierry Breton and two leaders of the German organisation HateAid, which works against online hate.

In Germany the tech wing appeared first. At the end of 2024 Elon Musk called the AfD the country’s last hope in the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”; in January 2025 he told its campaign launch in Halle by video that Germany focused too much on the guilt of the past. When the domestic intelligence service classified the AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist in May 2025, Rubio called it “tyranny in disguise”. In December 2025 some two dozen AfD politicians travelled to Washington, and a German edition of the conservative conference CPAC is being planned.

Thiel proceeds more quietly. He gave his Antichrist lectures in January 2026 at the Paris Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and in March in Rome, after a pontifical university had refused its premises. The software of his company Palantir is used by the police in Hesse, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and, since 2025, Baden-Württemberg, as we described in “The Stone That Looks Back”. The former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz has worked as a strategist for Thiel Capital since 2022. The German investor Christian Angermayer is Thiel’s business partner. Jens Spahn has confirmed that he attended Thiel’s discreet discussion forum five times; its documents state: “we deliberately keep in the background.” In “When Will Spahn Be Chancellor?” we asked about this network.

And there is a European counter-example. The Heritage Foundation called Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model” and has worked with a Budapest institute since 2023. In April 2026 Vance campaigned in Budapest for Viktor Orbán. A week later Orbán lost the election clearly, and the think tank in Brussels funded by his government is closing.

VII. The New Aristocracy

Lay the three layers on top of each other and a picture emerges. At the bottom a view of humanity: the many imitate, only a few are able to escape the herd. Above it a view of the state: the state is a company, the government its board. At the top a tool: a civil service that obeys the chief at any time. In none of these layers does the citizen appear. In Yarvin’s joint-stock company the inhabitant is a customer. If he does not like the service, he can leave. He cannot have a say.

That is what Bozarslan means by the “end of the idea of the citizen”, as far as can be inferred from the introduction. The old right-wing revolutions invoked blood and soil. The new one invokes talent and technology. Its aristocracy is not one of birth but of merit, or so it sees itself. Whoever has the capital, writes the programs and owns the platforms belongs to it. Ayn Rand, whom many of them invoke, had her own term for this: the “aristocracy of pull”, rule by those who are at the top not through achievement but through their closeness to power. In “Central-Power Orientation” we described the contrast between Cincinnatus and Caesar: does someone return power once its purpose is fulfilled, or does it become his person? Yarvin’s “American Caesar” answers the question in its very name.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: “New Right” is a label that lumps very different people together. Thiel is not Yarvin, Yarvin mocks DOGE, Bannon wages open war on Musk and Silicon Valley, Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, and Girard would probably have agreed with none of them. There is no common plan and no bloc. That is true. But a movement needs no common plan as long as its wings pull in the same direction, namely away from the citizen. Whether they still do so once the common opponent is gone is an open question.

The second objection: the counterforces are working. Congress has not abolished the Department of Education, and the same Supreme Court has for now stopped the dismissal of a Federal Reserve governor. And in Hungary voters removed the movement’s model, even though the American vice president campaigned for it in person. That too is true, and it is the most important reason not to give in to a mood of doom.

The third objection comes from Bozarslan himself: we are not living in the 1920s and 1930s. The comparison is meant to sharpen, not to equate. The essay would be refuted if courts, elections and parliaments in the United States reversed the new dismissal powers in the coming years and the citizen were once again more than a customer with the right to cancel.

IX. Walpurgis Night

The title of Bozarslan’s book recalls Walpurgis Night, the witches’ sabbath on the Brocken. In Goethe, Mephisto leads Faust through the throng, and when Faust believes he is steering the revelry, Mephisto says: “You think you are pushing, and you are being pushed.” The sentence fits everyone involved. The billionaire believes he steers the politician, the politician believes he uses the thinker, the thinker believes he is writing history. Who is pushing in the end, none of them knows.

If a new aristocracy arises that invokes merit: who will still check whether it deserves it?