“Burnt a Hole In Me”: Yarvin’s Nazi Origin Story
How a 20-year-old Nazi propaganda video helped launch a movement threatening global democracy.
According to himself, Curtis Yarvin’s dark enlightenment came 20 years ago on a new video platform called YouTube. He describes watching a video interspersing photos of “Western decadence, decay, rot, filth” and a “bright, optimistic young man in Nazi uniform.” This led him to a self-realization: “You’re just like, yeah, that’s the thing… Something’s wrong here.”
Two years later, Yarvin started a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, and became the chief “philosopher” who influences JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and a slew of other highly influential figures around Trump.
Yarvin’s Hole
Yarvin’s anecdote is a deeply disturbing confession that the “hole” burnt in his head was garden-variety Nazi propaganda. He told the story just after the Charlie Kirk murder to theocratic Thiel-ally Rod Dreher at the white nationalist Danube Institute in Budapest.
“To describe the first moment in which I realized that things were going to happen in history had not ended, was like 2005 or something. YouTube was a new thing. And I saw this video. I’m sure it’s long since disappeared, but it was really just like kind of burnt a hole in me. And it wasn’t even a video. It was actually just a sequence of photos… the even photos were sort of brightly colored pictures of just like general Western, you know, decadence decay, rot, filth, you know, we’ve all seen these things. And then interspersed between them. Formal dress portraits of Nazi officers. And I was just like, you watched this thing. You’re just like, filth, degeneration, bright, optimistic young man in Nazi uniform, filth, degeneration, bright, optimistic young man in Nazi uniform. And you’re just like, yeah, that’s the thing. And like basically coming from it’s a form because it’s breaking in a way. It’s just, it’s a totally forbidden thing and that you watch it. And you’re just like, wait a second. Something’s wrong here.
Yarvin was not just accidentally confessing. Minutes later, he said the Allies used “really criminal measures to suppress national socialism”—the ideology that caused WWII and the Holocaust.
The West went in, you know, the allies went into Germany and used these very, very harsh, really criminal measures to suppress national socialism and they expected like, you know, we’re wolf terrorists to be everywhere and they were nowhere. And they expected the same thing in Japan. They had kamikazes, right? They had these incredibly radicalized people, nothing crickets, right?
Redpilled
Yarvin’s self-described origin story is telling and disturbing. Yarvin describes exactly the kind of simple propaganda the Nazis deployed in the 1930s as his turning point. He says he watched this “totally forbidden thing” and was granted a dark enlightenment:
“You’re just like, wait a second. That’s the thing.”
This is precisely what I have described as the process of “redpilling” people into the brainwashing process. First, present them with disturbing, traumatic content (“filth, decay”)—which dissociates them—and then provide the salvation for it (bright young Nazis). The video he describes is a basic propaganda tactic. The fact that he fell for it betrays his inability to discern reality from fantasy.
One can only assume that after seeing his first Nazi propaganda video, Yarvin went on to consume many more of them. Yarvin’s key “insight” was that race-mixing leads to degeneracy. He has defended apartheid, defended slavery, and is a key proponent of ending democracy in favor of a monarch.
Behind Yarvin’s redpill was insecurity and fear: fear of losing control, fear of losing his privileged status, and fear of disorder and chaos. His essential command is that order is the most important characteristic of a society—as long as it elevates his own class.
Fuentes’ Fear
Nick Fuentes is a proud national socialist—a despicable Nazi who has denied the Holocaust, called for the elimination or expulsion of Jews from America, and spewed every racist stereotype known to man. Nevertheless, he has a significant platform, was recently granted an interview by Tucker Carlson, and was defended as a legitimate voice by Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts. Fuentes also infamously had dinner with Donald Trump.
This video caught my attention because it demonstrates clearly the essential fear of so many insecure white men like Yarvin and Fuentes—fear of chaos and disorder—and how they come to the wrong solution for it.
“The highest political virtue is order. That is the greatest ordering principle… Order comes first. Liberty comes second. And order has to be maintained by a powerful state. Order has to be maintained by authority…
This was one of the freest countries to ever exist. And the problem is that those things are starting to become undermined, the authority, the force and the legitimacy that founds the authority of the state, which holds the country together, which enforces the laws.
I don’t believe in the individual… Individualism only makes sense in a white Christian patriarchal society.”
Fuentes’ key claim is that the “highest political virtue is order” which is also Yarvin’s complaint. Fuentes abrogates his own individuality—unless it’s within a simple order: “white Christian patriarchal society.”
This is emblematic of a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. Order and chaos are not the same thing as simplicity and complexity. It is correct to say the role of government is to keep order—but that order can either be simple or complex, according to the will of the people.
The complaint of Nazis like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Fuentes is not actually about chaos and disorder. Their complaint is actually about simplicity versus complexity. They don’t like things to be complicated. They just want it to be easier for them—for things to be simple.
This is, of course, childish, selfish, and ignorant. It is a developmental stage that most people work through by puberty. But unfortunately for us, people like Yarvin, Fuentes and their followers never left it.
We Are Not Simple
Humans are on a ladder of increasing complexity that started with the big bang. We are not built to make things simpler, we are built to increase complexity—it is encoded in the stuff we are made of. The desire to destroy that complexity in favor of something simpler is unnatural.
Unfortunately this drive to reverse our course in the universe from the complex back to the simple, has taken power in America. Yarvin and Fuentes are the pseudo-intellectual philosophers of the Dark Enlightenment and MAGA. They want the world to arrange itself around them—just like Donald Trump.
In truth, it is all metaphysics for a toddler—perhaps a symptom of the terrible twos of the emerging global consciousness, a period every parent knows that we all just have to get through.
Regardless, people like Yarvin, Fuentes, and their hangers-on are, in the end, just little boys having a tantrum.
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Thank you for saying more about Yarvin. He’s an important philosopher just the same as Trump is a successful business man.
The first time I saw swastikas in Arizona was about the mid 90’s. They were prominent and on faces and necks. Pro tats. Not jail ones. It coincided with the waiting period to purchase a firearm. That begun in 94. So then. Just fyi. Great work as always, Jim.
I believe Yarvin has Jewish heritage on his father’s side. I think there’s a psychological term for this where people identify with their oppressors. Kind of like Steven Miller, a Jewish Nazi.