The philosophy behind DOGE: Curtis Yarvin and the Butterfly Revolution

Last week, KeepTrack documented the steps Elon Musk is taking to unilaterally shut down government agencies. Now, we’ll look at the philosophical underpinnings of his entire DOGE operation.

Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin is a relatively obscure figure among legacy media. Unless you’ve trawled the depths of the alt-right blogosphere, you’ve probably never heard of him. But it is imperative that you know who he is now that his acolytes are running the most powerful country on earth.

Yarvin is a founding member of a specific wing of alt-right political theory called the neoreactionary movement, sometimes abbreviated to NRx, and frequently referred to by adherents as the “Dark Enlightenment.” Describing the movement as a whole is difficult due to the wide range of beliefs that meld together in online right-wing forums, but the broad strokes combine:

• Accelerationism: the belief that capitalism and technology must be massively sped up and intensified to destabilize existing systems, cause a collapse, and ultimately create radical social transformations

• Techno-Utopianism: the belief that unbridled technology can create the perfect society—at least, for those who control it

• Monarchism/neo-monarchism: the belief that absolute power should be wielded by a single sovereign

In Yarvin’s formulation, the resulting theory calls for a political movement to install a monarch, who he likens to a CEO, to dismantle democratic institutions and liberal (in the philosophical sense) power structures in order to create a technology-infused neo-feudal society that privileges an aristocracy made up of people like him—elite programmers and tech founders—while oppressively controlling the unworthy masses.

• As far-fetched as it sounds, no, Yarvin is not joking about any of this. Writing under a pseudonym earlier in his career, Yarvin described trying to think of a “humane alternative to genocide” to do away with the “underclass” of “unproductive members of society.” What he landed on was to “virtualize them” in “permanent solitary confinement” with “an immersive virtual-reality interface” to “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin's ideas are influential among Silicon Valley insiders like billionaire Peter Thiel, who has been friends with Yarvin for years. Thiel was an early supporter of Donald Trump in 2016 and is reportedly responsible for introducing him to now Vice President J.D. Vance, whose political rise he also funded. In no small coincidence, Peter Thiel also happens to have co-founded PayPal with none other than Elon Musk.

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Application to the Trump administration

For as much as Yarvin has been associated with Trump, he’s not actually a very big fan of the president. “Caesar was an Olympian. Trump should be on Ozempic,” Yarvin wrote last year. What Yarvin does like about Trump is his cult and the blind dedication of MAGA to follow their leader in any undertaking, no matter how illegal or unconstitutional.

Charlottesville and January 6 were the last lame breaths of what John Adams called “mobocracy” in America. Just as monarchy cannot exist when the king is five years old, mobocracy—that is, revolutionary democracy—cannot exist when the “mob” just wants to grill.

Under the rules of revolutionary democracy, that the state is the motor of revolution means that Trump must become a revolutionary martyr—energizing his supporters by provoking the state to treat him unjustly. Like, say, MLK Jr.

Yarvin goes on to state that “ideally,” for the purposes of his revolution, “Trump would be murdered” or “assassinated,” so his followers (described as “used-car dealers, general contractors, small-town investment advisors”) will “arm themselves and demand the new Trumpenreich.” Trumpism, not Trump the living human being, is required to bring about Yarvin’s ideal world.

However, as we all know, the actual assassination attempts on Trump’s life failed, and Trump the person is in office. Faced with this reality, Yarvin concedes that Trump cannot be “the brains” of his new regime. Someone else needs to be brought into the administration to conduct the revolution:

Trump himself will not be the brain of this butterfly. He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

For Trump, being President will be exactly like it was—all the photo-ops and more—without any papers to sign, “decisions” to “make,” etc. The CEO he picks will run the executive branch…

Enter Elon Musk, the “Dark MAGA” (read:Dark Enlightenment) CEO pulling the strings behind Chairman Trump. As CEO, Musk's job is to enact the changes necessary to end democracy and usher in a new era of techno-monarchical rule.

A Trump who was confident enough to act as America’s chairman of the board, not America’s CEO—who could pick an amazing CEO, ready, willing and able to take unlimited executive authority over all federal, state and local agencies, corporations and institutions—could truly make America great again.

The way the duo could go about “truly making America great again” in neoreactionary fashion is laid out in Yarvin’s blogs and across a couple of podcast interviews, as summarized by Vox two years ago.

Campaign on instituting autocracy, and win

A would-be monarch like Trump should openly tell voters he will assume absolute power if elected.

Yarvin: To escape the sickening, ever-growing coils of DC’s Gordian knot, American voters have only one realistic option. They need to elect a President who clearly states his intention and preparedness to take over the entire American government, assuming plenary power—not just in response to any specific event or emergency, but immediately upon his inauguration (when his democratic authority is at its strongest).

• Last year, Trump exhorted “Christians” to “get out and vote, just this time,” promising: “You won’t have to do it anymore…You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

• Trump said he would use the military to handle what he called “the enemy from within,” explaining that he isn’t worried about chaos from his supporters or foreign actors, but instead from “radical left lunatics.” “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he added.

• When right-wing radio host Glenn Beck asked Trump if he would lock up his opponents in a second term, Trump responded, "The answer is you have no choice because they're doing it to us."

• Trump “pledged” to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Being elected after telling the nation your true intentions will provide a mandate for doing away with democracy and instituting an authoritarian rule, Yarvin writes.

Politically, democracy is required because only democracy has the political power to put a monarchy in place. That is: winning an election, with a mandate to truly rule…the only way for democracy, today, to defeat oligarchy is to elect a monarchy. What’s cool is that this is actually completely legal. Even if it wasn’t, we could do it any time.

• "The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive," Trump said of his 2024 presidential victory

• Marco Rubio said, “the Senate is going to give great deference to a president that just won a stunning electoral college landslide…and a mandate."

• Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) said Americans did not need to see the Matt Gaetz ethics report when Trump nominated him as Attorney General because "the American people knew the kind of mandate they were giving Donald Trump when they elected him."

• Elon Musk affirmatively retweeted a post claiming that “President Trump received a clear mandate from the people to assemble an extinction level event administration…”

Purge the federal bureaucracy and create a new one

Once elected, time is of the essence, Yarvin warns. A transition team must be ready with a plan to replace the “old regime,” made up of the thousands of civil servants who would object to the actions of an incoming monarch.

...this next regime cannot reuse the organization, personnel or procedures of the old regime. Otherwise, there is no regime change at all. But if most of the old staff are not mostly happy that the change happened, their severance payments are inadequate. Since the next regime owns them but does not want them, it is forced to buy them out.

There is even a cute acronym for any future Coriolanus: RAGE, which stands for retire all government employees.

“The speed that this happens with has to take everyone’s breath away,” Yarvin said on a podcast. “It should just execute at a rate that totally baffles its enemies.”

• One of Trump’s first acts in office was signing an executive order reclassifying tens of thousands of federal employees as “Schedule F,” making it easier to fire them without cause.

• Elon Musk’s DOGE then sent a “Fork in the Road” email offering deferred resignation to federal employees. According to the White House, about 75,000 workers accepted the offer.

• The administration is in the midst of firing probationary workers across all departments of government. According to the Office of Personnel Management, more than 200,000 people are on probationary status, meaning they have been in their position for one to two years (depending on the agency rules).

• According to internal DOGE documents obtained by the Washington Post, “phase three” of their plan to purge government involves large-scale firings of “corrupted branches.” DOGE’s projected timeline for implementation of phase three is February 20-July 19.

After “retiring all government employees,” the CEO should abolish agencies by unilaterally defunding them:

“You don’t want to take control of these agencies through appointments, you want to defund them. You want them to totally cease to exist.” This would of course involve some amount of chaos, but Yarvin hopes that will be brief, and the actually essential work of government would quickly be taken over by newly created bodies that could be under the autocrat’s control.

• Elon Musk’s DOGE put thousands of USAID employees on leave and attempted to gain access to the U.S. Department of Treasury payment system to stop money from flowing to the agency. It is unclear if Musk was successful in stopping the funding at its source, as the Department of Justice has equivocated in court. Either way, Trump and Musk have succeeded in effectively shutting down USAID.

  • At least one DOGE staffer (a 25-year-old who made racist social media posts supporting eugenics) had the access necessary to make changes to critical Treasury Department code.

• Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025 and now Director of the Office of Management and Budget, ordered Consumer Financial Protection Bureau staff to stop work and closed the agency’s headquarters earlier this month. Vought then directed employees to give DOGE access to all non-classified systems and Elon Musk tweeted, “CFPB RIP.” Just last week, the administration fired 100 CFPB workers.

• The head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia resigned yesterday after being ordered to freeze the bank assets of an organization that was given an environmental grant under the Biden administration.

Ignore the courts

“The wisdom of the Founders,” Yarvin writes, was its failure “to specify the precedence of the branches.” There is no reason for the executive branch to accept a co-equal judicial branch of government. Instead, a CEO monarch must declare absolute executive supremacy—what Yarvin likens to “an American reassertion of the ancient English rule that ‘the king is above the law.’”

• J.D. Vance, a follower of Yarvin’s ideas, said in 2021 that when a court tries to stop Trump from firing “every civil servant in the administrative state,” he should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

• Earlier this month, Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” after the courts blocked Trump’s executive order purporting to revoke birthright citizenship.

• Elon Musk tweeted that “Democracy in America is being destroyed by a judicial coup,” after a judge blocked the firing of an independent ethics watchdog.

• While the courts have ordered the restoration of funding for federal grants and programs, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. found that the administration has continued "to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds."

• Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) sued the Trump administration last week, alleging that agencies are defying court orders by continuing to withhold billions of dollars in federal aid from the state.

However, to be truly effective in bringing about absolute rule, a monarch must push for the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a Supreme Court case that limits the power of presidents to fire the heads of independent agencies.

The most obvious kind of strike is a decapitation strike, in which the regime changes in one blow…The core of this strike is the repeal of Humphrey’s Executor, one of the core decisions protecting the Babylonian captivity of the Presidency, and thus of democracy itself.

• Last week, the Department of Justice notified Congress that it intends to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Humphrey’s Executor because it is “unconstitutional.”

• Just yesterday, Trump signed an executive order that declares that “Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests all executive power in the President, meaning that all executive branch officials and employees are subject to his supervision.” The press release continues: “Voters and the President can now hold all Federal agencies—not just Cabinet departments—responsible for their decisions, as the Constitution demands.”

Co-opt Congress

Like the judicial branch, Yarvin views the legislative branch as subservient to the presidency. “As far as the Constitution specifies, the role of the legislative and judiciary branches in the functioning of the executive branch is purely advisory,” he writes. However, to avoid all the messiness of Trump’s first term (you know, the impeachments), it would be best if the legislature was controlled by people who would never try to advise the monarch to begin with.

• Lawmakers report “fears of physical violence” from Trump supporters impacting their votes, including the certification of election results following the January 6 insurrection. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?” then-Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) asked.

• Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) told CNN: “If you look at the vote to impeach, for example, there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives…And that tells you something about where we are as a country, that members of Congress aren’t able to cast votes, or feel that they can’t, because of their own security.”

• Only two of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the insurrection are still in office (Rep. Newhouse and Rep. Valadao). Three of the seven Senate Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are still in office (Sens. Cassidy, Collins, and Murkowski).

• House Republicans voted down a Democratic attempt earlier this month to subpoena Elon Musk to answer questions about DOGE’s operations.

• When asked if there is “an inconsistency” between Republicans “railing against ‘unelected bureaucrats’” yet “ceding Article I powers” to Elon Musk, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) defended DOGE’s work as “an active, engaged executive branch authority doing what the executive branch should do.”

Centralize police and government powers

“The essential desideratum of any regime change is unilateral central control of the security forces—mainly the police,” Yarvin writes. “Unless, as an immediate consequence of the election, the President is not in direct command of every law enforcement officer in the United States, he is not on a success path.”

Trump has not (yet) accomplished this task, outside of pressuring local police forces to assist immigration authorities in locating and arresting undocumented immigrants. According to Yarvin, Trump should create “a new emergency command structure in which loyalty is both personal and institutional” and “test a command” by asking all loyal law enforcement to wear “a red armband to show that he follows the new President’s direct, unconditional command.” Any officer who resists must “be stripped of their badges immediately.”

Shut down elite media and academic institutions

There may be one thing that Yarvin hates more than democracy, and that’s what he calls “the cathedral”: journalism and academia.

The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.

To end the tyranny of the cathedral—and install the tyranny of a monarchy—a leader has two options. Option A is a “soft reset,” in which “all rivers of state cash that flow to the universities [are] plugged” and all federal employees are prohibited from talking to the press. Option B, the superior choice, according to Yarvin, is nationalizing the press, universities, foundations, and nonprofits, then “retir[ing] their employees and liquidat[ing] their assets.”

The goal of nationalization in a hard reset is not to create official information organs under central control. It is not even to prevent political opponents of a new regime from networking. It is simply to destroy the existing power structure, and in particular to liquidate the reputation capital that these institutions hold at present.

• The Trump administration is imposing a 15% cap on indirect funding by the National Institutes of Health to support research institutions like John Hopkins University. According to a lawsuit, the cut in funding will cause large universities to abandon studies of diseases like cancer and force smaller institutions to “close entirely.”

• The FCC, under Project 2025 contributor Brendan Carr, has opened an investigation into NPR and PBS for airing prohibited commercial advertisements and another into CBS’s alleged doctoring (in Trump’s words) of a Kamala Harris interview. He has also reinstated complaints about how ABC News moderated the TV debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and is seeking an investigation of NBC for “promoting invidious forms of DEI.”

• Elon Musk tweeted over the weekend that 60 Minutes “engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” adding, “They deserve a long prison sentence.”

• In 2020, Trump threatened to jail journalists who don’t reveal sources: "If the reporter doesn't want to tell you, it's 'bye-bye,' the reporter goes to jail."

Mobilize supporters

If the institutions deny the President the Constitutional position he has legally won in the election, the voters will have to act directly. Trump will call his people into the streets—not at the end of his term, when he is most powerless; at the start, when he is most powerful. No one wants to see this nuclear option happen. Preparing for it and demonstrating the capacity to execute it will prevent it from having to happen.

To best mobilize supporters, Yarvin suggests creating a “Trump app” to communicate with his voters.

If you are not willing to install an app that does nothing (by default), you are not a Trump supporter—and Trump (who hates to lie or even exaggerate) would certainly not want to count you as his supporter.

When you sign up, you do tell the Trump app who and where you are. You even take a picture of your driver’s license…[Eventually,] you are ready to show up at demonstrations, etc. You share your location with the app. Your secure profile includes any military training and equipment—for emergencies only, of course! You may even find yourself linked to a local or neighborhood cell. But your time and energy will not be seriously encroached upon.

When Yarvin wrote the above passage in April 2022, Truth Social had just launched. Elon Musk was months away from purchasing Twitter. Now, with the experience of the last two years, we can see how either platform would be useful for calling Trump supporters “into the streets.” The January 6 insurrection was incited, in part, on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, after all.