I remember when all the radical lefties were complaining that the university curriculum was too packed with tired old white men, which was true–the Western Canon is overstuffed with old guys. But I always thought the idea was to open the door to more diversity, to recognize more worthy women and brown people, and let the curriculum breathe a little more. It was less about culling Greek philosophers and to introduce more Great thinkers of different backgrounds.

Well, leave it to the conservatives to carry the idea to an extreme. Texas A&M wants to ban Plato.

Texas A&M has decided that Plato is not to be taught, a determination that suggests the problem is not ancient philosophy but what happens when people read it.

As Daily Nous reports, the university has instructed a professor not to teach Plato’s work in a “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, an act that is both historically incoherent and politically revealing. Plato is not a contemporary provocateur. He is one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, taught because his writing invites questioning, disagreement, and analysis. Treating Plato as expendable makes clear that the concern is not ideology, but cognition in the time of Trump.

Madness.

What else bothers me is that the Texas A&M administration is overstepping their bounds. Administrators do not typically have the background to dictate the curriculum in a university department; faculty must have the autonomy to determine the content of their courses.

For example, most of the courses I teach are established topics widely recognized by all universities. I teach cell biology and genetics using standard textbooks, and further, these were courses long approved on my campus, and I’m continuing a curriculum established by my predecessors. If an administrator tried to meddle in the content of those courses, not only would I be pissed off, my colleagues would join me in protesting.

We also have to be prepared to extend our teaching to include new material — does anyone think an administrator is more up to date on current advances in biology than I am? I’ve also introduced entirely new courses, like my eco-devo course, which wasn’t just a whim on my part. I had to show my sources, and document my teaching plan to my department. I had to get approval from my division. I had to write a proposal that was presented to all the faculty of my university. Administrators had to deliver the final stamp of approval, but that’s just a formality — course content is and should be entirely a product of qualified faculty and experts.

I hope Texas A&M faculty are ready to rise up in furious protest at administrators killing Plato in a philosophy course.

If you are anything like me, you are eagerly anticipating the day that either Trump drops dead (preferably slowly, and in agony), or that Congress grows a spine and asserts its constitutional authority to slap the old fart down. The former is probably much more likely. Unfortunately, just seeing Trump hog-tied or buried in a shallow grave on one of his golf courses does not solve our problems — JD Vance is waiting in the wings, and he might be even worse. While Trump is amoral and greedy, Vance has a terrifying ideology driving him. He’s an acolyte of Thiel, and Thiel is an acolyte of Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin is almost incomprehensibly popular among rich Silicon Valley libertarian/authoritarians, but I would guess one source of their esteem is Yarvin’s constant sucking up to the wealthy. They should rule the world, he thinks; democracy is bad, and we should let tech parasites be our overlords. Only problem with his perspective is that he’s a moron. Daniel Drezner sums him up.

My considered reaction: at least with the likes of, say, Marc Andreessen, some effort is required to parse out his true-but-not-new points from his new-but-not-true points.1 With Yarvin, it’s much simpler: pretty much everything he says in this interview is wrong. There is no kernel of an interesting idea gone bad; there is just a bunch of half-baked analogies that fall apart if you have a decent liberal-arts education. It’s like listening to a stoned, first-year MBA student who read his father’s outdated history books when he was a teenager and half-remembers them.

I’ve read some of Yarvin’s online work, but not much. It’s self-serving drivel, and anyone with any intelligence will recognize that within a few paragraphs. I think Elizabeth Spiers recognizes the problem.

The most appropriate treatment of Yarvin is one that recognizes his influence on Silicon Valley billionaires who don’t recognize him as a shallow thinker bc they’ve never taken a single class on political philosophy or history or philosophy

So yeah, kids, get a liberal arts education or you might end up as stupidly blinkered as a Yarvin or Andreesen or Thiel or Musk. Maybe my university ought to consider that for a slogan (our current advertising mantra is “More Is Morris,” which is short but not very deep. Don’t worry, they’ll probably change it next year.)

There’s a longer article on Yarvin in the New Yorker, but he’s hardly worth the extensive coverage — my feeling reading anything about him is that anyone pays attention to him. Here’s a short summary of his agenda.

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

It wouldn’t be of much concern if Yarvin was just a crank with a blog, but he has become a crank with influence on some very powerful people.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

If Trump were to die, Stephen Miller’s influence might diminish somewhat (a good thing), but he’d be replaced by Curtis Yarvin as advisor, with every Silicon Valley venture capitalist breathing over his shoulder, urging him on to empower mega-capitalism. Yarvin is a scary extremist dude.

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

How does this bozo get the attention of media and influence so many of the assholes in power? I’ve been doing it wrong. If I want to be rich and popular, I really need to start praising the rich and popular, telling them that they deserve to rule the world.

I’ll try that right now.

…

Any minute now.

…

Urk…

…

…

Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to be that stupid and craven. Sorry. I’d rather just fade away into obscurity.

I am horrified by this incompetent man who is running the country.

We should not allow our country to be run by “STUPID” or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE!, which is why Trump should be impeached and his entire administration dismissed, ultimately to be arrested and tried. He is providing the evidence himself: you do not ask people to take a cognitive test unless you suspect there may be a cognitive problem, and asking them to take the test three times suggests that there is a deep problem here.

He is in cognitive decline. He’s also in poor health, to the point that he is tweaking his medication against all medical advice. He’s taking 4 times the recommended daily dose of aspirin.

They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?

I know a little bit about this, with my history of cardiac problems. Initially they had me taking baby aspirin, low dose aspirin, but then the doctors decided, on the basis of evidence, that this wouldn’t help. So guess what I did? I stopped taking it. I didn’t quadruple the dose.

He’s a stupid, ignorant old man.

Yet somehow this man holds unfettered power; he can, basically on a whim, without congressional approval, invade a foreign country and snatch up the elected leader of that country. Venezuela sets an ugly precedent. I guess we couldn’t complain if the EU swept in and scooped up our president (please do, we’ll welcome you with flags and parades).

Worse, he’s declaring that this sudden snatch-and-grab means we’re now in charge, that we “run” Venezuela, and he has admitted that the motive was simple greed, to steal their oil. We tried this in Iraq, at the cost of a million lives and trillions of dollars. Are we supposed to believe that this will work this time?

I need a stronger word than “worse,” because now Stephen Miller is talking about taking over Greenland.

One of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, Stephen Miller, questioned Denmark’s claim on Greenland and suggested the U.S. could seize it without pushback, stoking concern among European allies.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller sidestepped questions of whether the U.S. will use military force to take Greenland, a territory of Denmark, and said the president has been “clear for months” that the U.S. should have it.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said in the Jan. 5 interview.

We are so fucked. The whole world is fucked.