Motus Mentis

Curtis Yarvin, formerly “Mencius Moldbug” and now America’s best-known monarchist, posted a snappy thread on X yesterday, in response to an acerbic tweet by the Trump administration’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security, Stephen Miller.

Miller was commenting on the murder of 23-year-old Irinya Zarutska, who was stabbed fatally in the throat by a homeless madman as she sat reading on a train. Her killer had been allowed to remain at large despite a long series of prior arrests. (If you haven’t heard about this killing, it’s because — for some reason that will be as mysterious to you as it is to me — not one of the mainstream news media have mentioned it.)

Here’s Miller’s tweet:

I’ll transcribe Moldbug’s thread below; you can read the original here.

Notice the “othering” of “Democrat Party”—an exonym. Democrats say “Democratic.” Always. Anthropologically, exonyms are a normal aspect of martial hostility. What puzzled me when I started noticing this 20 years ago was an anomalous absence of hostility—given these circumstances

Carlyle called it the “Universal Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Association.” This was in 1850. Odds are, if you’ve had a disease for 175 years, it’s a pretty serious freaking disease. I used to be firmly against using martial rhetoric and it’s not really to my taste. But

It would be amazing to see SM as VP in 2029. It is amazing to see this broadly accurate generalization widely surfaced. If we lived in a just world, recognizing this reality would be sufficient to change it. Unfortunately this fallacy has a name

It would astound the whole monarchist past that, considering the now utterly rotten condition of the most essential institutional fabric of our civilization—from jurists who unleash schizophrenics with knives, to virologists who invent pandemics—we can fret about “bad kings”

The most mentally defective European kings or Roman emperors, Caligula, Erik XIV of Sweden, even Ivan the Terrible, could not have imagined systematically perverting the mission of the state in this way. More important: if they could have imagined, they could not have succeeded

It is cute to design formal systems for royal accountability, but all kings have enemies to be informally accountable to. An insane monarch is a weak monarch and will lose his power or his life. In “our democracy,” this sh*t not only happens—it never stops. It can’t be stopped

Noticing it is the first step in stopping it. Spreading that notice is the second. It is human nature to care if a madman kills a pretty girl on the train, even when crime is down and a responsible journalist would focus on corn statistics. But Spiro Agnew said the same stuff

I’m a monarchist because without a king, there is no choice but to leave the last word on anything to either expertise or popularity. Popularity is terrible. An absolutely awful way to run any system. Popularity would never do this, though

And sovereign expertise is poison. When the virologists fund themselves, they will wind up inventing viruses. When the judges judge themselves, they will wind up unleashing knife-wielding madmen. It’s the highest impact thing they can do. So they will come to believe in it

The kingless, yet powerful, marketplace of ideas selects for both specialized power generators (eg, gain of function research), and generalized ones (eg, progressivism). Progressives barely notice when their bad ideas wreck their supposed beneficiaries. Just high on power

If the marketplace of ideas is not powerful, if its thinkers are ivory tower idealists who no one listens to, these dumb ideas are obviously dumb and get tossed. If there is a king above the experts, he sees when they get corrupted by power. They’re stealing his power. Not cool

But once you decide you don’t need a king and can decide everything by popularity, then realize that politics is terrible and the decisions should be left to the experts— You’re in a pretty tough spot once you realize that this slowly, over decades, turns your experts evil

Carlyle in 1850 realized that the Foreign Office, with all its “Great Games,” the vital importance of keeping Russia out of Tibet and other critical problems demanding Adventurous Victorian Expeditions, was doing gain of function research on British foreign policy

Eventually this mindset would extend to Western Europe and the vital importance of having a bigger navy than the Kaiser, and burn down Victorian civilization itself. For Serbia, or something. The experts said it was necessary. Principle was at stake

You are a monarchist once you see a black madman stabbing a pretty white girl on a train and realize: This is not because of the madmen. This is not because of the blacks. This is not even because of the judges, the journalists, or even the Jews. This is because we have no king

Is Trump a king? Not even close. Not even 10%. Not even 1%. Not even 0.1%. But it actually does feel safer in DC. And the statistics agree. And people like it. Monarchy isn’t against expertise or popularity. The king should have the smartest professors and also be wildly loved

But how exactly does this happen? We are a long, long way from answering this question. We can kind of see it now tho. Maybe in our lifetimes idk