Crackpot rightwing theorists, then and now

I’ve been thinking the last few days about trying to write some pieces about the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary year in a way that wouldn’t sound dorky. I’m still thinking that one out. But earlier this week I came across an interview with Curtis Yarvin, who is kind of a celebrity for being a dystopian political guru of sorts to TechBro fascist set. It was in the Vienna daily Der Standard and conducted by Eric Frey, a very good political reporter, including on American politics.

The paper’s subhead describes Yarvin as “leading thinker of the techno-rightists.” The main headline describes him as a “rightwing extremist,” which seems accurate enough. (1)

Yarvin in the interview shares his certifiably crackpot version of some aspects of American and other history, which is why I connected it to retrospectives on the American Revolution. Because history is not a documentary replay of past times. I heard someone recently comment that what happened in the past are facts, while history is our narratives about the past. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need honest and accurate history. But our understanding of past history is by definition selective.

Financial wealth and being born rich can tempt people within those categories to assume that their opinions and insights have special value. And they often expect everyone else to share that view. As John Maynard Keynes famously observed, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

But he wasn’t implying that such often-crackpot insights are harmless. He says before and after that:

[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. … I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. (2)

In other words, people who should know better often take crackpots from characters like Curtis Yarvin as serious descriptions of reality.

The New Yorker did a 10-page article on Yarvin last year if you want an extended look at what this particular TechBro crackpot is about. (3) I’m tempted to describes what he says as sophomoric nonsense. But that would be insulting to college sophomores everywhere.

The Standard interview isn’t much better. Yarvin’s comments there are superficial gobbledygook from an arrogant twit who is obvious more interesting in being provocative than in doing anything so normal as to try to organize his ideas (or half-ideas) in a meaningful way. I’ll quote this part:

The Kennedys were a type of monarchs, and so was Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). He had an abundance of power that Donald Trump does not have and never will. Trump cannot push through many things in the Senate, the Republican leadership despises him. He may have ten times more power than he did in his first term, but FDR had ten times more power than he did. Every few decades, there is a dictator in the USA who can steer the country in a certain direction. That's how America has become the country it is. In other times, the USA is ruled by oligarchies. …

[Trump] has a number of strengths and weaknesses. He has a lot in common with FDR, as he is a very intuitive thinker and not a logical, almost instinctive one. But unlike FDR, he does not come from the American ruling class. He doesn't speak their language, he almost seems like an outsider. This is a serious problem, because you can't govern without elites. Trump is a populist rebel. A rebellion of the lowly against the upper crust. [my translation to English]

The garbled comments about FDR and the kooky usage of populism, reminded me of something that Yarvin may be partly aping. There was an active group of Hitler sympathizers in the US in the 1930s and early 1940s. The one who stood out and was generally recognized as the chief ideologist of “National Socialism” in the US was a guy named Lawrence Dennis. His take on Roosevelt is that his government was fascist. But it was a “bad fascist” one. What was needed was a brand of “good fascism,” along the Hitler-Mussolini lines.

Lawrence Dennis was a really strange character. Unknown to those who admired him as the chief American Nationalist Socialist theorist, Dennis was an African-American. The superior North American White Race couldn’t even produce their own top Nazi ideologue! They had to find a black guy to do it.

Gerald Horne wrote a biography of him: The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (2006). It includes a description of an even better-known Hitler admirer, Charles Lindbergh, when he met Dennis. Lindbergh, who made it a habit to not shake hands with black people:

The controversial aviator, who had fascist leanings all his own, was taken aback when he laid eyes on the silken Dennis. It was “rather a shock, when one sees him for the first time, especially in a room in Washington,” a city of rigid racial segregation, “for one is so unprepared for his type. He would seem more in place at some frontier trading post along the eastern border of Europe.” Lindbergh, who had firmly held ideas about white supremacy and racial purity, “tried” as they “talked” to “fathom the nationality of his ancestors.” But Dennis, a product of Exeter and Harvard, could perform “whiteness” with the best of them, with his elegant manner,

Surrendering to Dennis’s bedazzling performance of “whiteness,” Lindbergh “concluded that some” of his “ancestors” “might have come from the Near East” …

“Lucky Lindy” came to agree with Dennis more and more. In fact, says one biographer of the charismatic man who for a time defined celebrity, Lindbergh’s “arguments and phraseology had some striking parallels with Hitler’s and even more those of Lawrence Dennis” with whom he was to be in “frequent contact.” There was “no doubt that the flier had read and been strongly influenced by Dennis’ books” [according to Lindbergh biographer Kenneth Davis]. [my emphasis]

Just a reminder of what crackpot weirdos even leading US Hitler admirers of the time were. Even if they were sometimes accidently “multicultural,” like with Lindy and Lawrence Dennis.

Whether today’s TechBro fascists have yet succeeded in out-weirding characters like Lindbergh and Dennis is hard to tell. They’re certainly giving it a try!

Notes:

(1) Frey, Eric (2026): Rechtsextremer US-Blogger Curtis Yarvin: "Das Schlimmste an Trump ist seine Unsicherheit". Der Standard 12.Mai.2026. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000319756/rechtsextremer-us-blogger-curtis-yarvin-das-schlimmste-an-trump-ist-seine-unsicherheit?ref=rss> (Accessed: 2026-12-05).

(2) Keynes, John Maynard (1936 [2013]): In: Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 7, 383. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(3) Kofman, Ava (2025): Autocracy Now! New Yorker 06/09/2025, 28-38.