4Chan history is as bad as law office history
By 
Speaking of pseudo-scholarship that can construct its own reality if it comports with the policy preferences of powerful Republicans, let us consider the case of Curtis Yarvin (and J.D. Vance):
Over recent decades, a computer programmer and prolific internet commenter has risen from the obscurity of forums and pseudonymous blogs to the pages of this newspaper, as a friend to Vice President JD Vance and as a person who influences many of the people who influence President Trump.
Posting as Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin built a small but influential following among the more reactionary segments of the tech elite, providing them with an elaborate and conspiratorial vision of a nation under the heel of a tyrannical and suffocating liberalism, a broad group of individuals and institutions he calls “the Cathedral.” The path to national renewal, Yarvin argues, is to unravel American democracy in favor of rule by a benevolent C.E.O.-monarch drawn from a cadre of venture capitalists and corporate oligarchs.
With views like these, it is not difficult to understand how Yarvin won the admiration of powerful patrons. He does little more than tell them what they want to hear. If he had been born a minor noble scrounging for influence in the court of Louis XIV, he would have been among the first to exclaim the absolute authority of the king, to tell anyone who would listen that yes, the state, it’s him.
We do not have kings in the American Republic, but we do have capitalists. And in particular, we have a set of capitalists who appear to be as skeptical of liberal democracy as any monarch. They want to hear that they are the indispensable men. They want to hear that their parochial business concerns are as vital and important as the national interest. Aggrieved by the give-and-take of democratic life, they want to hear that they are under siege by the nefarious and illegitimate forces of a vast conspiracy. And hungry for the kind of status that money can’t buy, they want to hear that they deserve to rule. Yarvin affirms their fears, flatters their fantasies and gives them a language with which to express their great ambitions.
[…]
More egregious in the interview are the moments when Yarvin gets basic history wrong in an attempt to demonstrate the sophistication of his views. He answers the first question of the exchange — “Why is democracy so bad?” — with what he thinks is a pointed rejoinder:
“You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first Inaugural Address, in which he essentially says, hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.”
This is flatly untrue. You can read Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address to see for yourself. There is no threat to seize power. “I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require,” Roosevelt said. “These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.”
If Congress failed to act, Roosevelt did not say that he would do it himself and seize absolute power. He said that he would ask Congress to grant him “broad executive power” to “wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” But even this, Roosevelt emphasized, would be done within the bounds of the Constitution and in fidelity to the principles of American democracy.
More on Vance’s history with America’s most mediocre monarchist here. And yes you should be asking questions about how Vance was able to get so much credibility among mainstream media outlets for writing a terrible book filled with hierarchical contempt.