These Weirdos are Serious

PLUS A SOUPY SANDWICH

It takes a certain kind of evil to make Jeff Bezos look like an innocuous billionaire who’s just trying to earn an honest buck.

Sure, he bilks small businesses and busts unions, but at the end of the day Bezos just wants to hang out with his midlife-crisis girlfriend on his mega-yacht while her bodacious tatas lead the way.

It’s the classic tale of a hopeless nerd who gets the hot girl and lives happily ever after, the end.

Downright quaint

Not so much for guys like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, whose billions aren’t enough to live happily ever after. It doesn’t matter that they’re living better than everyone else, the pursuit of happiness is anathema to these men.

Addicted to their own resentments and discontent, they rage against the very machine that enabled them to hoard so much power and wield influence.

And for what?

Real Life Nerd Games

I first learned of Curtis Yarvin from Virginia Heffernan’s recent Blitzscaling J.D. Vance, (a perfect companion piece to her brilliant Blackpill essay). Yarvin is the “Neo-Reactionary” thinker and blogger whose “Dark Enlightenment Movement” has its tentacles in the GOP’s presidential campaign, the one that’s getting a monthly infusion of $45 million from Elon Musk.

A cross between David Carradine in Nerds and Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley (the latter was a Libertarian/Satanist)

Yarvin is basically the Dungeon Master of the New Right, a referee and storyteller for Player Characters such as Vance, Thiel, and Musk — they are his fans, thought partners, and investors in his authoritarian vision.

Yarvin thinks America is glitching and needs to be unplugged, wiped clean of its old programming (democracy), and rebooted with a CEO/monarch with absolute power as its new operating system. He’s laid out a detailed path to victory, a Monster Manual for getting the liberal elite and the rest of us NPCs to fall in line.

Here’s a good place to end the Dungeons and Dragons analogue and let Yarvin abbreviate his playbook in his own words, with his preferred Lord of the Rings template:

He has used a Lord of the Rings metaphor in which red-staters are “hobbits,” battling the elite blue-stater “elves,” but with “dark elf” allies — elite blue-staters like him. “The first job of the dark elves is to seduce the high elves — to sow acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds,” he wrote. Then perhaps they’ll change sides, or at least their “conviction and energy” may flag.

He wants to convince elite liberals and leftists to lose faith in the system, believing that when enough of them no longer want to defend it, it will be easier to topple. In his thinking, that’s the prerequisite for regime change.

(From Vox)

That last part hits hard. There was a period during the pandemic when, like many of us, I was extremely online and abusing my algorithm. My fun leftist memes got increasingly bleak, going from activism, to anarchy, to apathy: Voting doesn’t matter, it’s too late to fight climate change, the system is rigged beyond repair. One of the anarcho-brat influencers I followed implored his huge Instagram audience to just stay home from the 2020 election and smoke weed because who cares.

Appealing as that may sound to a naturally apathetic Xennial like me, the irony was the far-left, all-or-nothing rhetoric could have been pulled from the techno-fascist playbook. Social media CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk would love nothing more for us to say fuck it and live on our phones consuming memes while they controlled the rest of the world.

This was Black Pill-ing for progressives, which is exactly what Yarvin says will pave the way for more motivated “dark elves.”

If someone on the left gives up because our government isn’t matching their perfect and unassailable ideals, or they’re just tired, great! That’s one more “unproductive” human body to be converted to biodiesel, as Yarvin once proposed. He later said he was kidding, and offered a “humane alternative to genocide” of the underclass:

Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Um, like an addictive app with an unending scroll?

Yarvin’s ideas make Project 2025 sound as dangerous as the He-Man Woman Haters Club. They’re so batshit that it’s easy to wave him off as an extremely online, unserious person. But with aggrieved billionaires on his side and one of his former protégés potentially being a heartbeat away from the presidency, maybe these guys should be taken as seriously as any would-be school shooter who posts twisted shit on the internet, before it’s too late.

How to do that is where I’m flummoxed. I’m staving off my own fatigue and apathy that comes from an exasperating 8 years. So I’ll vote. (Check your registration here.) And I guess keep you posted if there’s some Great War of the Ring we have to boot up for later on.

On to sandwiches!

A Soupy Sandwich

For the second installment of the sandwich series, my plan was to get a pastrami on rye in Midwood, but this goy didn’t know it was Tisha B’Av, a Jewish period of mourning when observants don’t eat meat. Nor will they serve it to gentiles.

So, we went southeast to Brennan & Carr for their famous roast beef sandwich “bathed in broth.” Some might call this a French Dip, but not Brennan & Carr, which has been operating at this Marine Park/Sheepshead Bay location since the 1930s.

It was a perfect afternoon. The waiter put us in our own little VIP lounge which helped me settle into my new role as a sandwich influencer. We talked to the proprietor Mike Sullivan on our way out, you’ll see him in the video:

One thing I didn’t mention is the Diet Coke from the fountain. This is an important detail as good fountain sodas are so rare in New York. If you order a Diet Coke at a restaurant, there’s a very good chance it will arrive in a can, which is no fun.

There’s something magical about getting the syrup-to-soda water ratio right. Brennan & Carr nailed it, a perfect accompaniment to this special occasion sandwich.

Sandwich Stats ✅

Place: Brennan & Carr, Sheepshead Bay/Marine Park border

Sandwich: Roast Beef Sandwich, no cheese

Price: $9.30, cash only

Components: Top notch

Structural Integrity: Surprisingly sturdy for having been dipped in broth

Service: Absolutely perfect.

That’s it for this one. See you soon.