Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Actually, Moldbug’s impressively discursive style makes it difficult to identify a moment that one could point to and call “the red pill.” There’s nothing like Yudkowsky’s primer on Bayes that one looks at and thinks, “OK, that’s quite a good explanation,” and no iconic argument that serves as a hook. Generally speaking, however, the awful, searing truth with which Moldbug believes we cannot cope is that liberal democracy is pretty shit. Moldbug puts a genuine effort into selling this truth, arguing that there exists a de facto conspiracy of, as he puts it in the Open Letter, “mainstream academia, journalism and education”16 that he calls the Cathedral, as it constitutes a de facto state religion that means that democracy is secretly an Orwellian mind control process. And to be fair, Moldbug really sells it, essentially spinning a vast historical conspiracy theory in which the Roundheads of the English Civil War have secretly controlled the world for centuries via the false rhetoric of classical liberalism and the Enlightenment. But it’s hard not to notice that this is basically crap.