Yarvin's Strange Argument on Populism and Gain-of-Function Research

Scott Alexander recently accused Curtis Yarvin of selling out by embracing MAGA, even though Mencius Moldbug once warned of the dangers of right-wing populism. In response, Curtis put together this tweet thread, which I’ve gone through the trouble of numbering and copying here.

1/ I apologize for my ad hominem attacks on Scott Alexander. I should not chastise him for once editing me out of his blog. I should praise him for mentioning me at all, thus unavoidably enduring a vast multiyear crapstorm. It’s Sunday and this is what Jesus would say. Also

2/ Scott asks a perfectly fair question: why I used to pearl-clutch so hard about authoritarian populism in 2008, but am perfectly okay with the Trump administration in 2025–despite all its manifest errors, incompetences, and even cruelties?

Surely the answer is that I’ve Sold Out

3/ No, Scott, I pearl-clutched in 2008 for the same reasons you’re doing it now: I was a libtard and a coward.

I still am. I’ve just recovered a bit more. You could work on that too, Scott.

(You’re better paid, too. The right, unlike the left, isn’t here to pay off its friends.)

4/ (Scott is obviously not *paid* by the left. He is paid by his audience, like me. His is bigger, if not better.)

Being a libtard and a coward was not, of course, my logic. Just my motivation.

Let me explain the logic of my corrected attitude toward authoritarian populism

5/ Politics = monarchy, oligarchy, democracy: authority, prestige, popularity. Authoritarian populism versus institutional meritocracy.

Fact: the physical energy of democracy has declined 1000x in 250 years. Go on pretending that January 6 is the storming of the Bastille lol

6/ On January 6, no one’s organs were ripped out and carried around on spears. Nor were they going to be. Lol.

Effective, non-symbolic democracy is always the fuel behind monarchy. The mob always finds a leader.

In 1789, that fuel was dynamite. In 2021, it was Miller Lite

7/ Claude says all the Miller Lite sold in the US in 2021 had 1.5 petajoules of energy, which could lift 5000 tons to orbit. But:

Unlike dynamite, it won’t do it *by accident*. If your fuel is 1930s Germans, it’s gasoline. Worry about gasoline vapors.

Don’t worry about beer vapors

8/ Effective democracy is a political engine. This engine concentrates, contains and controls its fuel.

When the fuel is strong—hardened WW1 veterans—containment is key. When the fuel is weak—checked out suburban grill-Americans—concentration is key.

Lite beer doesn’t explode

9/ But what about all the awful deeds of Orange Hitler? OMG we need to reopen Auschwitz but as a yuppie eco boot camp, so everyone who makes this comparison can spend a week there—two, for the worst cases. Probably the existing facilities aren’t big enough, we’ll have to franchise

10/ When you see the world through a narrative produced by interested powers, you are living in “managed democracy.”

We know all about Putin’s pet media. But that’s just the difference between democracy managed by monarchy/authority, and democracy managed by oligarchy/prestige

11/ Our 20th-century Walter Lippmann managed democracy usually gets you by making you look through a microscope at 10000x resolution. You see some fake “PhD student” with a Star Wars name, in a Star Wars costume, bundled into a van by goons, for “writing” college essay 5 years ago

12/ Muh freedom of speech.

You forget that this regime has spent the last century managing public opinion with every carrot and stick it can find, up to and including asking professors to compose their own inventive and detailed loyalty oaths to gay race communism.

Oh yeah that

13/ You forget that the US immigration system was already a giant Kafkaesque monster that has been randomly tormenting Americans of every color, creed and nationality, whether their name is John Smith or Jabba the Hutt, basically since Pocahontas was a little girl. Oh yeah that

14/ You forget that during the lifespan of this regime, whose crimes have no statute of oblivion, many once civilized places became desolate and dangerous, forcing whole populations to flee—including most of most of our cities, even the hometown of the new Pope lol. Oh yeah that

15/ You forget that when we let doctors and virologists, not Facebook moms and narcissistic billionaires, run our medical research, they invented a pandemic and killed 20 million people, for absolutely no sane reason at all. And that was just the start of the crazy.

OH YEAH THAT

16/ But no—you can’t keep your eye away from that microscope. The poor lady with the Star Wars name. The PhD student. At Tufts which is actually a good university if not quite Harvard. On her metal bed. I hope they let her have her books! I bet they didn’t let her have her books

17/ Scott, managed democracy is normal. You know and I know: people don’t think. They have to be educated. Someone is always pointing a screen at them. Give the people power and they have to be trained to use it. It’s the trainers’ power.

But a managed philosopher is a hack

18/ How do they manage you? Like you manage anyone—carrot and stick.

You’re a libtard and a coward. The libtard gets the carrot—the lure of prestige. The coward gets the stick—the threat of cancellation.

This isn’t a new system. It wasn’t invented in 2012 lol. Or even 1962

19/ And authoritarian populism is the only force with the power to end it.

And today it’s about where fusion is: it’s a huge thing if it can light a lightbulb for 5 minutes. And yes there’s some radiation.

And the coal industry tells us it’s Fukushima and Hiroshima put together

20/ When the Trump administration does something crazy, stupid and even cruel—as seen through the libtard microscope—I think it’s actually a good sign in the grand scheme of things.

It means Trump supporters will support anything. Frankly, that’s the attitude they need to win

21/ The things that actually must be done are not crazy, stupid or cruel—but they are quite beyond the experience or understanding of those who will have to support them.

Republican voters, even Trump voters, are still far from granting this level of consent—but they are learning

As far as I can see, there are four running themes here.

1. American elites are bad. They’ve done bad things (#10, #13, #14, #15, #18)

2. Scott Alexander is a cuck and a libtard (#1, #3, #4)

3. Things that Trump or Trump supporters have done aren’t as bad as you think (#5, #6, #7, #9, #11)

4. Right-wing populism is weak, doesn’t have the “fuel,” which is I gather is why it’s not worth worrying about (#5, #6, #7, #8)

So if I’m interpreting this correctly, Curtis is saying the following: You think Trump is bad. Well elites are much worse! Fuel is a metaphor for capacity and willingness to do bad things for the sake of your cause, and establishment liberalism has more of that.¹ After World War I, it was Nazis and fascists who had fuel, so they were the danger. Today, you should support right-wing populism against the establishment. As for what has changed since 2010, Curtis says he was then a “libtard and a coward.” So he now can express his “corrected attitude toward authoritarian populism.”

From the NIH website page announcing Trump lifting the pause on gain-of-function research

What’s missing here unfortunately is any serious attempt to explain how authoritarian populism solves the issues he worries about without introducing new ones, or why other approaches can’t potentially work. Let’s take Yarvin’s logic on public health.

1. The medical establishment is bad because it conducted gain-of-function research.

2. Therefore, we should support authoritarian populism. In concrete terms, we should support RFK, who rejects vaccines, wants fewer drugs approved, and thinks 5G towers control people’s behavior

3. ?????

4. A new golden era of pushing scientific frontiers in medicine.

How exactly do we get from Fauci is bad, to let’s cheer on RFK, to accomplishing whatever goal we are working towards?

Curtis brings up gain-of-function (GoF) research a lot. But what happened in Wuhan being so fundamental to his support for populism is odd because nobody in MAGA was ever criticizing this type of work before Covid-19. And there were establishment figures who did so: namely Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, Richard Ebright of Rutgers, and The Cambridge Working Group they were a part of. After Covid-19, the only reason we can have a debate about zoological origins versus lab leak in the first place is due to academic papers and journalistic accounts written by members of the establishment.

I don’t know if the lab leak hypothesis has been proved with any degree of certainty, as I haven’t looked into this debate for a while, but let’s just say that it has for the sake of argument. If the first Trump administration had been ruled by authoritarian populists, more like the second one is, would they have even stopped gain-of-function research? Perhaps, but only by accident, because MAGAs have shown themselves to be hostile to funding science more generally. If your argument is we should shut down all scientific work because it’ll stop things like GoF research, I guess that’s an argument for supporting populism, but one needs to make it directly.

In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk GoF studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong. Remind yourself of this the next time you see rightists trumpeting some headline showing the media being wrong about something. These people create no new knowledge, and spend their time criticizing those who are trying to report on complicated issues in real time by selectively clipping headlines collected over the course of years. They then use this as an excuse to call for blindly following Trump, since his mistakes don’t count. It’s true that after it began to look like Covid-19 might have leaked from a lab, MAGA started talking a lot about the dangers of GoF research. But so did many other people! Trump just signed an executive order addressing the issue, but it was an expansion of policies that had begun during the Biden administration.

In summary, before 2020, some members of the establishment were warning about GoF, while authoritarian populists ignored the issue, and Trump actually lifted a then-existing ban. After Covid-19 hit, MAGAs joined a more general consensus that this kind of research was dangerous, which was built on the work of establishment journalists and scientists, who they need to rely on to even know whether they’re right or not. How exactly is this a win for authoritarian populism?

It is true that public health authorities worked to temporarily censor discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, so we can count that against them. Tom Cotton was the first prominent figure who suggested it as a possibility in February 2020, and it took another year for members of the media to take the idea seriously. This is worth criticizing. But I’m unsure what exactly supporting authoritarian populism gets us here, or why we should draw lessons about it being a positive force. Yes, by blindly opposing elite narratives, they will occasionally be correct. But they’ll also often be very wrong!

When it came to GoF research, authoritarian populism contributed nothing before Covid-19 came along – again, except Trump restarting funding for it – and afterwards it just adopted the same position as the liberal establishment. MAGAs also became hostile to vaccines, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are one of the best things humanity ever created, and yes, that includes those produced to protect against covid. This shows that when MAGAs get things right, it’s not due to wisdom, but mostly blind luck. And they’re rarely going to be able to foresee problems beforehand. All they can do is gripe in retrospect.

The question for Yarvinism is this: Instead of supporting dumb populist rage and hoping it gets a few things right by accident, why not just…criticize the establishment for things it gets wrong, and support serious people who you think are correct on the substance of issues? Is GoF research inevitable under our current form of “managed democracy”? And is authoritarian populism the only way to make sure it doesn’t happen, without crippling science more generally?

The case for populism would be much more convincing if Mencius Moldbug in 2010 was standing up and saying that “This GoF research thing is a problem guys. We better hurry up and put the morons in charge or we’re going to be in trouble!” But like every dissident right, MAGA, or populist thinker, he did not say a word about the issue before 2020. Meanwhile, trained scientists with PhDs in biology who worked at institutions like Harvard and Stanford were flashing warning signals. Why should we now listen to Yarvin and RFK with his theory of 5G brain waves rather than scientists who know what they’re talking about?

This Yarvin syllogism applies to other issues too. Take his complaint about the Pope’s neighborhood being destroyed by crime (tweet #14), which he appears to have gotten from a recent Steve Sailer post.

1. Blacks commit a lot of crime, our inner cities are in terrible shape.

2. Support right-wing populism, get a government that draws intellectual and spiritual inspiration from pro-Hitler accounts

3. ?????

4. A world of increased public safety, and racial peace and harmony

It is not difficult to imagine how this could go wrong. Blind opposition to people who are oppressing you might make sense under some circumstances. But Americans are citizens of the most successful nation in human history living at the best time to be alive in human history. Perhaps if things were otherwise we’d have to roll the dice with MAHA and MyPillow. Complaining about the existence of GoF research and inner-city crime does not get you anywhere close to meeting that standard.

1. Update: I may be getting the fuel metaphor wrong. This is why it’s usually a good idea to write to be understood. Regardless, this doesn’t change the main points of this article.