The Excuse Came First

By David Crush | | Politics | 11 min read

A wax-sealed envelope dated Nov. 2 rests on a pile of blank ballots beside a fountain pen and loose cash, lit by a desk lamp.

At 5:38 on the morning of November 4, the commentator Scott Greer posted that Elon Musk had spent nearly $500 million to help Republicans in the midterms, and “it didn’t make any difference.” Curtis Yarvin quoted him: “It all went to ‘consultants’ who make boomer ads for boomer TV. He might as well have poured it down the toilet.”

Seven months earlier, Yarvin had a different complaint about Musk’s money. On April 15, under a post about Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor of California, he wrote to Musk directly: “You have 200 times as much money as him. He spends it on power. You spend it on running away from power.”

Yarvin is the blogger whose acronym RAGE, “Retire All Government Employees,” preceded DOGE by more than a decade. In April he told the richest man in the world that his failure was not spending. In November he told him the spending was a waste.

My claim is narrow. Across the 2026 cycle, Yarvin held four positions before the vote and reversed each one after it. Every reversal left the theory where it was. Every one ended in the same remedy: more central control and less judgment from voters. A theory that every outcome confirms is not being tested by outcomes.

I have written about the theory in The Theory That Cannot Fail, the one system he built in Ideas Are Easy, the following in The Philosopher and the Crowd, and Musk’s money in What Half a Billion Bought. This is the cycle, in his words.

The Money

The April post was not a one-off. On April 28, 2025, he wrote: “Philanthropy is a machine for converting money to power. Libertarians and conservatives don’t want power. They want to be free from power.” In August 2025 he said of Musk: “Arguably the tragedy of our era is that Elon does not actually want power—much less absolute power. He’s a completely sincere person with nothing to hide.”

For eighteen months the diagnosis held steady. The right loses because its rich men will not turn money into power.

In 2026 the richest of them did. The New York Times tallied about $474 million in Musk contributions from January 2025 through October 14, 2026, more than any donor who was not a candidate has given in a single cycle. About $216 million went to his own America PAC, which the Times described as “spending money across the country on an extensive field operation.” About $212 million supported Ken Paxton in Texas. Forbes counted 106 Musk-backed candidates. The day after the election, 44 had lost and 18 had won, nearly all in seats Republicans were expected to hold.

After the result, the money became the problem. Not the amount: the use. In the postmortem he published on Gray Mirror that morning, he asked: “What does it cost to spend $500 million in the midterms on boomer consultants who place boomerslop TV ads? Also a lot.” On November 5 he moved from the money to the man. Under a post calling the donations “all wasted on consultants and ads,” he wrote of Musk: “He wants politics to go away and stop bothering him.”

In July 2025 he wrote that “they keep Elon from getting a clue.” In August Musk was sincere and wanted freedom. In April 2026 he was running from power. In November he wanted politics to leave him alone. The reading of Musk changed with each result. The theory did not.

To be fair to Yarvin, he did warn about ads before the vote. On October 31, replying to a post Musk had endorsed, he wrote that Republicans were relying on “huge buckets of money dumped into boomer TV ads that no one watches.” That warning came true in the narrow sense that the ads did not win. But “spend it on power” never said how. His own April example was a self-funding candidate, whose spending is ads and staff. America PAC paid for canvassers too. The “how” arrived after the loss.

Winning

On October 26, Yarvin wrote: “To win an election, you need to show 50.1% of the voters about 1/1000 of this truth. This is an almost impossible task.”

On October 30, he quoted Musk’s warning about a Democratic sweep in 2028: “And if the Republicans get a clean sweep? Whew. Saved by the bell. Nothing will happen. This time.”

On November 4, nine days after “almost impossible,” he opened the postmortem: “Republicans can win easily. They can win the next election easily. They could have won this election easily, if they were living in reality.”

Sit with that sequence. Winning was nearly impossible. Winning would change nothing. Winning was easy. Each sentence covered a different outcome. Had Republicans won, nothing would have happened, as predicted. They lost, and the loss proved they had not been living in reality, as he had always said.

Texas

Musk’s largest bet was his own state: about $224 million across Texas efforts, by the Times’s count. At 11:42 on Election Day morning, Central time, with the polls open, Jonathan Keeperman asked: “What model of the American electorate has Texas voting for a guy who says God is trans?” Yarvin answered:

The “Texas” in your mind is an abstraction which no longer exists. Probably only 40% of the votes are from anyone you would clock as a “Texan” if you met them in the street. The schools from K to PhD are indistinguishable from Massachusetts. I am begging you to live in reality

He wrote the explanation for Texas before Texas had finished voting. If the state was already gone, April’s advice was wrong. If it could be won, the morning post was wrong. He did not have to choose, because the result would arrive after both.

The “40%” is not a statistic. It is a guess about how people look. The returns describe something else. James Talarico won by about twelve points. He carried Kaufman County, which Trump won in 2024, and won back South Texas border counties that had swung to Trump. Those are voters who changed their minds.

He had seen this before. In February, Republicans lost a special-election runoff for Texas Senate District 9. Yarvin blamed reliance on “the civic motivations of their voters” instead of “systematically harvesting votes.” The post he was quoting, from Ross Hunt, said Republicans lost “because almost all of the independents and some of the Republicans voted Dem.” That describes a failure to persuade, not a failure to turn out. Musk replied to Yarvin’s post: “Not a good sign.” Yarvin answered evidence about voters with a model of voters, and the richest man in the world was reading.

The War

On March 8, with the Iran war under way, Yarvin wrote that the Islamic Republic was “a client power of the American left” and that “Trump is only bombing Tehran because he can’t bomb Brooklyn,” Brooklyn standing in for American progressives. In the same thread: “Foreign policy is always domestic policy by other means. Destroying the two greatest mistakes of 20th-century diplomacy, the revolutions we sponsored in Cuba and Iran, would be a huge blow to the American left.”

In the NBC News exit poll, 62 percent of voters said starting the war was the wrong decision.

In the postmortem, a Republican leader has “exactly two jobs: fighting wolves, and herding sheep. Not ‘governing.’ Not building ballrooms, bombing Iran, etc.” In March the war was a strike at the enemy. In November it shared a list with the ballroom. The postmortem does not mention that he had called it a blow to the left.

What Does Not Reverse

Four positions moved. The remedy stayed the same, and it grew.

In February, Republicans needed “a real political machine.” On November 4 the list was longer. Trump should resign so that JD Vance can run as the incumbent. Candidates should be cast like actors, with “all the funding and all the staff” centralized. The party should become “a shadow single-party state” with its own intelligence organ. And voting should become an app:

Voting is just data entry. If you have the party’s app installed, it will show you what data to enter and how to enter it. Ideally, this nuisance would be eliminated, and the party would just vote automatically on your behalf.

Democratic voters, in the same essay, are “clients” who “are not political ‘citizens.’ They are harvested by the head.” He promoted that passage himself on X that morning, to more than 700,000 views. On November 6 he praised Nick Fuentes, who had asked Trump to “make one phone call” to Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg so the right could “take off the chains” on their platforms. Yarvin’s comment: “When he’s on his game he’s as good as Hitler.” Fuentes is the white nationalist who called Hitler “f***ing cool” on Piers Morgan’s show last December.

None of this was offered as a plan while the money was being spent. None of it can be tested before the next loss. All of it moves one way.

I read this as a concession. On October 26 he called persuading a majority “almost impossible.” On November 4 he designed voting so that persuasion is unnecessary. He keeps the ballot and removes the voter. A writer who says he cannot convince a majority, then proposes a system that does not need one, has conceded the argument he was supposed to win. In July 2025 he had put it plainly: “We are here to turn over the table. And without the people, the king is nothing.” On November 3 the people answered.

The postmortem ends with an offer: “(50 invites to my Urbit lodge, %moldbug-club, behind the paywall. Discuss there.)” Urbit is the operating system he spent seventeen years building and, in 2022, told a podcast audience not to use.

The King Test

The 2026 primaries were a small trial of one man choosing for everyone. Trump endorsed Paxton over John Cornyn, a four-term incumbent, a week before the May runoff. Paxton won the runoff by twenty-eight points and lost the general by about twelve. By The Week’s count, 9 of Trump’s 24 Senate endorsements lost, along with 11 of 22 for governor. The White House’s explanation was “candidate quality matters.”

Yarvin’s fix is more selection from the top. One person choosing the nominee is what produced Paxton. The only correction available was the voters, and they used it.

His readers will answer that Trump is not a king in Yarvin’s sense. The postmortem agrees: a Republican president “is not the God-Emperor” and is “quite firmly chained.” Granted. A real sovereign has the same problem with less correction. When a king’s choices fail, Yarvin’s own design relies on an anonymous board of trustees holding the keys to remove him. That board has never existed anywhere. The voters exist.

The Seal

There is a name for a belief arranged so that evidence against it counts in its favor. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule called conspiracy theories “self-sealing.” Yarvin supplied a clean example in June, when Musk said he was called a Nazi to encourage people to kill him. Yarvin’s reply: “The reason they call you a Nazi is to get you to deny that you’re a Nazi.” The denial becomes the proof.

The cycle has the same shape over time. A win confirms the theory, because nothing happens. A loss confirms it, because Republicans were not living in reality. Not spending confirms it: running away from power. Spending confirms it: the wrong kind. I am not saying his politics are a conspiracy theory. I am saying the reasoning seals the same way, and no date on the calendar can open it.

He told the richest man alive to spend on power. The man spent $474 million. The voters said no. The theorist’s answer was a bigger machine, an app that votes for you, and fifty invitations to a chat room on the software he once told people to avoid.

Sources

Yarvin in his own words:

Musk’s spending and the results:

Other:

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