#Blogger Currencies

[carlocarrasco]

US Dollar reserves of the Philippines reach all-time high of almost $112 billion

Based on the preliminary data of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the American Dollar reserves of the Philippines reached $111.981 billion (as of September 2024 specifically) which counts as a new all-time high, according to a Manila Bulletin business news report. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from Manila Bulletin report. Some parts in boldface… The country’s US…

[johanbetter]

New Blog:

[counterfeitloveheist]

I have recently started investing in Crypto with a starting amount of $15 in the last week ive made $5.50! buttt with some investments ive recently made i'm down to $18.60 ......My Point is if you can make money from a $15.00 investment imagine what $100 or even $500 can get you in a few days!? FWI..this is not investing advice just an experience of mine.

[thealchemistbae]

Asteroid Mony (7782) Persona Chart Pt. 2 Observations 💰

Disclaimer: This post is for entertainment purposes only.

thealchemistbae © do not copy, redistribute, or edit my content.

If you enjoyed this post, you can leave me a tip via PayPal at goddessguapa@gmail.com or via Venmo @goddessguapa. Thank you.

Let's talk careers and job vibes based on your North Node sign in the Mony Persona Chart. This is how you are destined to secure the bag, and these are the fields that align with your money karma. This isn't just any job list. This is your soul-aligned path to wealth. This seems to be more accurate in how you will make money in this lifetime. I have studied billionaire charts and their north node in this persona chart has confirmed to me that they are in their prospective careers and of course the rest of the chart verifies it. We are going to break this down to get the full picture. We are going to look at the sign your NN is in, and the house. In Part 3, I'll discuss degrees and rulerships because that is IMPORTANT too!

North Node in Signs:

💲: Aries -> Your bag comes from taking initiative, personal leadership, and being unapologetically bold. You're not here to follow. You're here to start trends, take risks, and own your path. Destined jobs: Entrepreneur/CEO, Influencer, Personal trainer, Motivational Speaker, Army/Military/Law enforcement, public figure/brand front face.

💲: Taurus -> Your bag comes from creating luxury, security, and beauty. Slow, sustainable growth. Lean into sensual skills, create consistent income, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Destined jobs: Real estate, Chef/baker, Fashion/beauty Influencer, Musician/vocalist, Jewelry designer, Farmer or herbalist.

💲: Gemini -> Your bag comes from talking, teaching, writing and sharing your ideas or the internet/social media. Your words literally attract money. Speak, write, post and watch your bag grow. Destined jobs: Content creator, PR/marketing, Social media strategist, Writer/Blogger, Podcast host, Teacher/coach.

💲: Cancer -> Your bag comes from emotional intelligence, intuition, and creating safe spaces. Soft power is real. Care is currency. Emotional labor turns into income here. Destined jobs: Therapist/healer, Real estate agent, Doula/midwife, Chef/home chef influencer, Spiritual mentor/astrologer, Family business owner.

💲: Leo -> Your bag comes from creativity, performance, and being center stage. You shine for a living. Your presence is the product. Fame = fortune with this node. Destined jobs: Actor/performer, Entertainer, Creative director, Personal brand influencer, Children's content creator, Party planner/event host.

💲: Virgo -> Your bag comes from precision, healing, organization, and being of service. The more useful you are, the more you earn. Tiny details = major dollars. Destined jobs: Wellness coach, Nutritionist/herbalist, Editor/analyst, Accountant or organizer, Healthcare field, Pet care/grooming.

💲: Libra -> Your bag comes from relationships, balance, and creating beauty. Worth with or for others and create peace or aesthetic experiences. Money loves a vibe. Destined jobs: Relationship coach, Lawyer/mediator, Interior decorator, Fashion stylist, Brand strategist, Wedding/event planner.

💲: Scorpio -> Your bag comes from deep transformation, shared wealth, and taboo topics. Handle money, sex, death, and transformation and you'll never be broke again. Destined jobs: Financial advisor/investor, Sex education/OF baddie, Spiritualist/medium, Therapist/trauma healer, Psychologist or occult, Crime/true crime content creator.

💲: Sagittarius -> Your bag comes from teaching, storytelling, traveling, and sharing wisdom. Freedom is your wealth. Teach people, inspire and get paid to roam. Destined jobs: Travel blogger, Life coach/spiritual teacher, Professor/educator, Influencer abroad, Author/screenwriter, Religious/spiritual leader.

💲: Capricorn -> Your bag comes from climbing to the top, working smart, and building empires. You're here to run shit. Long term wealth, status, and legacy = your money path. Destined jobs: CEO/founder, Government official, Architect/engineer, Corporate mogul, Investor, Authority in your niche.

💲: Aquarius -> Your bag comes from innovation, internet, community, and future thinking. You're here to do it differently and get rich doing it. The weirder, the better. Destined jobs: Tech/start-up founder, Crypto/NFT content creator, Humanitarian/non-profit leader, Content strategist, Trend forecaster, Online community builder.

💲: Pisces -> Your bag comes from dreaming, healing, and connecting to the divine. You attract wealth through softness, vibes, and spiritual alignment. Intuition = income.

North Node in Houses:

🏦: 1H -> You're meant to make money by being seen, taking initiative, and becoming the face of your brand. Independence = income. People are drawn to you, not just what you do. Billionaire tip: Monetize your persona, presence, and authenticity.

🏦: 2H -> Money is part of your soul path literally. You're here to build personal wealth, own your worth, and create stability. Your bag grows when you stop relying on others and claim your value. Ruler of the 2nd = super important here.

🏦: 3H -> You get money through communication, education, media, marketing, or social platforms. Your voice is valuable. Teaching, influencing, writing, or public speaking is your income keys.

🏦: 4H -> Legacy wealth. Real estate. Family business. Money flows when you heal ancestral wounds and root yourself in emotional safety. Nurturing work, home-based empires, or generational blessings come through.

🏦: 5H -> Creative energy. You're meant to get paid for your art, style, presence, and self-expression. Think performers, content creators, fashion, beauty, and romance-based work. Leo placements here =star power.

🏦: 6H -> Money comes from being of service, creating structure, or mastering a craft. Health, healing, routines, or work ethic = money flow. You're meant to master discipline without overworking. Pay attention to details; they bring dollars.

🏦: 7H -> Partnerships = profit. You're here to collaborate, create win-wins, and monetize relationships. Think brand deals, joint ventures, legal/business consulting, or marrying well (no shame in the sugar game). Libra/Venus influence makes this even more luxe.

🏦: 8H -> You're meant to deal with big money; other people's money, investments, power, inheritance, or transformation. Passive income, joint finances, and financial alchemy are your lane. You're here to turn pain into profit.

🏦: 9H -> You get money by going global, thinking big, and expanding your beliefs. Education, spirituality, travel, publishing, and high-ticket services align with your money path.

🏦: 10H -> The bag is your birthright. You're here to be known, respected, and successful AF. Fame, status, career legacy, and boss moves are written in your money karma. Don't play small; your name is the brand.

🏦: 11H -> Money comes through community, followers, internet presence, tech, and innovation. You're meant to impact the collective and get paid doing it. Monetize your message.

🏦: 12H -> You're meant to make money through spiritual, creative, or subconscious work. Behind the scenes magic, dream work, healing, or divine timing leads to financial flow. Rest = revenue.

Where is your North Node and are you on your soul aligned path that you were destined to do to make money? Let me know in the comments.

thealchemistbae © do not copy, redistribute, or edit my content.

If you enjoyed this post, you can leave me a tip via PayPal at goddessguapa@gmail.com or via Venmo @goddessguapa. Thank you.

[salemlunaa]

☀︎it’s not transactional ☀︎

stop looking at methods as a unit of currency…

When people speak of relationships, they say it shouldn’t be transactional because that’s toxic. For example just because your boyfriend/girlfriend has done something nice for you doesn’t mean you owe him or her sex. And the same goes for your relationship with manifesting, you aren’t owed your desires just because you did some method? And why? because you already have them.

Stop seeing methods as if it’s some unit of exchange!! what it’s not:

you do the method →you get your manifestation

you affirm “I AM” →you induce the void state

you listen to that one subliminal →you have your dream body

It’s not something that you exchange, it’s not “I give my time and effort to this method and then in return I get my manifestation” stop seeing it like money. With money you give and you get something you paid for in return. That’s not how it works here because you don’t need to get something you already have and failure to understand will cost you a lot of time with your manifestations and will cost you a lot of blood sweat and tears that just don’t need to shed.

Methods don’t help you get things, the things you wanted were yours the second you wanted them to be. What methods do is remind you, because unfortunately we live in a society that drills a horrible way of thinking into our heads. Thinking that tells us that “nothing is free”, “you have to work for what you want”, “life isn’t fair”. And due to this thinking being instilled in us since forever, we need reminders, in a perfect world we would think of something and it would appear infront of us, but because of society, so much resistance has been created that we need reminders to brake those barriers, those reminders come in methods. And that’s all they are.

Now since i showed you what doesn’t happen, let me show you what actually happens:

you thought of it → it’s here → remind yourself with a method (optional) → stand firm (mandatory) → your already real desire appears in the 3d as a mere byproduct, the cherry on top if you will.

you are “I AM” → you set the intention to induce pure consciousness → you affirm “I AM” to remind yourself (optional) → you’ve induce pure consciousness, congrats

you are the operant power → you decide you want that body, it’s not desired anymore it’s just how you look → subliminal reminds you of that → appears in the 3d as a side effect

So do not come here and say “I tried this method and it failed me”, no. that’s just not possible. You failed to remind yourself and you wavered. Nothing to do with a lifeless method.

Let’s say you want to go to a certain destination? The method isn’t the car driving you there, it doesn’t help you get there, it doesn’t help you get anywhere. Because guess what? you were already at your dream destination, the method just helps you remember even when circumstances shows that your still in the unfavourable destination.

so please stop scrolling endlessly for the “best method”, because there is no method that objectively works better than the other, however there may be methods that help you stand a lot firmer. But you need to remember it’s individual, just because you saw a girl who did affirmations and got her dream life in a week doesn’t mean that will help you stand firm better, visualisation may help you achieve the favourable mindset a lot easier and quicker than a subliminal, everyone is different.

And that is why, you don’t need methods, when bloggers say “all you need is yourself” we’re not tryna give you some sappy motivation, it’s truth. You don’t need any method, at all.

☄️🐋 Methods are the reminder, not the booster or the helper… 💋

[mariacallous]

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.

If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.

In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret.

In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Earlier this year, Yarvin and I had lunch in Washington, D.C., where he had come to celebrate the regime change. He was in his usual getup: bluejeans, Chelsea boots, a rumpled dress shirt under a motorcycle jacket. After taking a few bites of a cheeseburger topped with crispy onions, he pushed his plate away. Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

The injections seemed to be working. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him, accompanied by a moody black-and-white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. Even his friends and family, however, acknowledge that he has room to grow as a communicator. He talks in a halting monotone, rarely answers questions directly, and is prone to disorienting asides. In the middle of saying one thing, he is always getting distracted by something else he could be saying, like a G.P.S. that keeps suggesting faster routes.

Yarvin, for his part, was relieved at how the interview with the Times had gone. “My main goal was, how do I not damage any of my relationships?” he said. For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul. He mentioned that a businessman he knew had once complained to a journalist that Thiel had not invested enough money in his company. “That’s one strike and you’re out, and he was out,” Yarvin said, sighing theatrically. His second goal, he said, was to reach the Times audience. This seemed surprising: he has called for the government to shut down the paper. “I tend to be more interested in outreach to people who share my own cultural background,” Yarvin explained.

He likes to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Jewish Communists from Brooklyn who met at a leftist gathering in the thirties. (He has less to say about his maternal grandparents, Tarrytown Wasps with a cottage on Nantucket.) “The vibe of American communism was ‘We’ve got thirty I.Q. points on these people, and we’re going to win,’ ” he said. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. After finishing school and failing to get tenure (“too arrogant,” Yarvin said), Herbert tried his hand at writing the Great American Novel, then joined the Foreign Service as a diplomat. In the following years, the family lived in the Dominican Republic and Cyprus. Herbert was cynical about working for the government, and Yarvin seems to have inherited his disdain: he has repeatedly proposed closing America’s embassies, a prospect the State Department is now considering in parts of Europe and Africa.

Yarvin is reticent on the subject of his childhood, but friends and family suggested to me that his father could be harsh, domineering, and impossible to please. “He controlled their life with an iron fist,” someone with close knowledge of the family told me. “It was absolutely his domain.” (Yarvin vehemently rejected this view, saying that people who are controlling tend to be insecure, “and that is very much not the way of my father.” Better words to describe him, he said, would be “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.”)

Growing up, Yarvin was sometimes homeschooled by his mother, and skipped three grades. (His older brother, Norman, skipped four.) The family eventually moved to Columbia, Maryland, where Yarvin entered high school as a twelve-year-old sophomore. “When you’re much younger than your classmates, you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien,” Yarvin said, adding that he was the latter. Yarvin was selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of math prodigies. He attended the university’s Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp for gifted children, and was a Baltimore-area champion on “It’s Academic,” a television trivia show. Andrew Cone, a software engineer who currently lives in a spare room in Yarvin’s home, told me that Yarvin’s childhood seems to have left him with a lifelong feeling of inadequacy. “I think he has this sense of being not good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform,” Cone said.

Yarvin went to Brown, graduated at eighteen, and then entered a Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate. Along with posting jokes, advice, light verse, and “flames” (blistering takedowns of other users), he maintained a “kill file,” a list of members he had blocked because he found their posts uninteresting. “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me. She was drawn to Yarvin after reading one of his virtuosic flames, and the pair dated for a few years. “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people,” she warned. “They will turn that skill on you.”

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,” as Tanner put it. He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry. Tanner recalled that when she once questioned the value of affirmative action in college admissions, it was Yarvin who convinced her of its necessity.

After a year and a half of doctoral work, Yarvin left academia to seek his fortune in the tech industry. He helped design an early version of a mobile web browser for a company that came to be known as Phone.com. In 2001, he began dating Jennifer Kollmer, a playwright he met on Craigslist, whom he later married and had two children with. Phone.com had gone public, leaving him with a windfall of a million dollars. He used some of the money to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory. “I was used to getting pats on the head for being smart,” he said of his decision to leave the cursus honorum of the gifted child. “Diverging from the pat-on-the-head economy was a strange and scary choice.”

Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

“You don’t ransack your own house,” he told me one afternoon, at an open-air café in Venice Beach. I’d asked him what would stop his C.E.O.-monarch from plundering the country—or enslaving his people—for personal gain. “For Louis XIV, when he says, ‘L’état, c’est moi,’ ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.” Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

Mass political participation would cease, and the only way that people could vote would be with their feet, by moving from one SovCorp to another if they became dissatisfied with the terms of service, like switching from X to Bluesky. The irony that dissenters like Yarvin would probably be repressed in such a state appears not to concern him. In his imagined polity, he insists, there would still be freedom of speech. “You can think, say, or write whatever you want,” he has promised. “Because the state has no reason to care.”

Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

For certain people, like meth addicts or four-year-olds, Yarvin said, too much freedom could be deadly. Then, gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

Presumably, Yarvin’s monarch would act decisively to safeguard his wards. At the Venice café, Yarvin lauded the Delancey Street Foundation, a nonprofit rehab organization, whose strict program he has characterized as exerting “fascist-parent-level control.” Some of his own proposals go further. On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy. An “African country today,” he told me, has “enough smart people in the country to run it—you just don’t have enough smart people to have a democratic election in which everyone is smart.” Because of such remarks, Yarvin is sometimes identified as a white nationalist, a label he delicately resists. In a 2007 blog post titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he explained that, though he is “not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he finds both whiteness and nationalism to be unhelpful political concepts. During lunch, he told me that he feels a rueful sympathy for the bigots of the past, who had some of the right intuitions but lacked the proper science. Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.

For several hours, Yarvin shuffled through his pitches for strongman rule, like an auctioneer desperate to clinch a sale. I listened patiently, though I was often puzzled by his factual distortions and peculiar asides. “What is the right policy in a completely new-from-scratch regime for African Americans?” he wondered aloud at one point. At first, this seemed like a non sequitur: I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.” Yarvin, who is an atheist, is not particularly interested in theocratic rule, but he advocates creating different legal codes to govern different populations. (He has cited the Ottoman millet system, which granted religious communities a measure of autonomy.) To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Yarvin is not known for his discretion. He has a habit of sharing private correspondence, as I discovered when he started sending me unsolicited screenshots of text messages and e-mails he’d exchanged with his wife, his friends, a fact checker at the Times Magazine, and someone nominated to the new Administration. He seemed troubled by the thought that the wit and wisdom they contained might be lost to posterity. He was more guarded about his friendship with Thiel, but he did mention a conversation they’d privately filmed together last year and boasted about a fortieth-birthday gift he’d received from the billionaire: Francis Neilson’s “The Tragedy of Europe,” a contemporaneous commentary on the Second World War, though not the first edition that Yarvin had been hoping for.

Thiel has always had a prophetic touch. He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and created Palantir, a data-mining firm that has just received a new contract to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out deportations. Thiel supported Trump back when doing so still made one a pariah in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he donated fifteen million dollars to J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest amount given to a single candidate in congressional history. A longtime libertarian, Thiel appears to have taken a Yarvinian turn around 2009, when, in a widely quoted essay published online by the Cato Institute, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin linked to it approvingly in a blog post titled “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral.” They soon met for the first time, at Thiel’s house in San Francisco, and, according to private messages I reviewed, struck up a confiding correspondence. Yarvin’s e-mails were long and homiletic, full of precepts gleaned from pickup-artist blogs; Thiel’s were straightforward and concise. Both men seemed to take for granted that America was a communist country, that journalists acted like the Stasi, and that tech C.E.O.s were their prey.

In the fall of 2014, Thiel published “Zero to One,” a best-selling treatise on startups, with Blake Masters, his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan. Before the book tour, Thiel asked Yarvin for advice on fielding questions he might get on how to steer more women into tech. The premise appeared to strike them both as misguided, since women, in their view, were less likely to have men’s aptitude for computer science. As Yarvin put it in one e-mail, “There’s simply no way short of becoming a farce for Google, YC”—Y Combinator, the startup accelerator—“etc, etc, to ‘look like America.’ ” Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify”—that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it—and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote. Once, at a dinner, Thiel quizzed Yarvin on how one might go about taking down Gawker. (As it turned out, Thiel had already decided to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against the online publication, which eventually bankrupted it, in 2016.) In e-mails obtained by BuzzFeed, Yarvin bragged to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor, that he’d watched Trump’s first election at Thiel’s house and had been “coaching” him. “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos replied. Yarvin wrote back, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

When I recently visited Yarvin’s Craftsman home, in Berkeley, I noticed a painting that Thiel had given him: a portrait of Yarvin in the style of a role-playing-game character card, bearing the legend “Philosopher.” As I sipped tea from a novelty mug featuring an image of Yarvin with a cartoon crown, he told me that it would be “cringe” for him to broadcast his relationship with Thiel—or with Vance, for that matter, whom he met through Thiel around 2015. “Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.” “He’s a really cool guy,” Yarvin said of the Vice-President, who followed him on X earlier this year. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) Apropos of his relationships with powerful men, Yarvin paraphrased to me “a wonderful piece of advice for courtiers” that he’d picked up from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to His Son,” an eighteenth-century etiquette manual addressed to the author’s illegitimate child: “Never bug them. And never let them forget you exist.”

Yarvin has had more success as a courtier to startup founders than as a founder himself. He launched Tlon in 2013, with a twentysomething former Thiel fellow. Yarvin approached computer science the same way he approached the U.S. government—with, as he put it, “utopian megalomania.” Yarvin’s visionary goal was to build a peer-to-peer computer network, named Urbit, that would allow users to control their own data, free from scolds, spies, and monopolies. Each user on the Urbit network is identified with an N.F.T. that acts like a digital passport. Even though Urbit promotes decentralization, the system is designed around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning “planets,” “stars,” or “galaxies.”

In an early sketch of the system, Yarvin named himself its “prince,” but he struggled to attract subjects to his imaginary kingdom. Like Yarvin’s political theory, his programming language, which he wrote himself, was daring, abstruse, and sometimes mistaken for a hoax. Ever the contrarian, he reversed the meaning of zeros and ones. After decades of work and an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, Urbit seems to function less like a feudal society and more like the Usenet forums of Yarvin’s youth. (The trade publication CoinDesk has called it “a slower version of AOL Instant Messenger.”) “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” a former Urbit employee told me, describing Yarvin as “the world’s first computer-science crank.” Yarvin left the company in 2019.

No longer needing to worry about spooking investors, Yarvin threw himself into the life style of a self-described “rogue intellectual.” Under his own name, he launched a Substack newsletter, “Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.” (Today, it is the platform’s third most popular “history” publication.) He became a fixture on the right-wing podcast circuit and seemed never to turn down an invitation to party. On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.” Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the “Red Scare” podcast, are among the most prominent avatars of the scene. In 2021, Thiel helped to fund an anti-woke film festival in New York, and Yarvin read his poetry at one of its packed events. Urbit now hosts a literary magazine designed to look like The New York Review of Books. “If you are an intelligent Jewish-American urbanite who wants to play around with certain Nietzschean and eugenic themes, you aren’t going to join tiki-torch-bearing marchers chanting that ‘the Jews will not replace us,’ ” the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari observed in an essay last year. “No, you turn to the dissident right.”

Yarvin has emerged as a veteran edgelord of this crowd, which he compared to San Francisco’s gay subculture in the seventies and to the Lost Generation of literary modernists—tight-knit communities whose members bonded over their sense of being outsiders. James Joyce, he said, sold few copies of “Ulysses,” but his friends, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “knew that what he was doing was good.” So it was with the creatives of the dissident right, whose endeavors, he felt, had been overlooked by the intolerant Cathedral. This past April, Yarvin pitched Darren Beattie, the acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, on a plan for “dissident-right art hos” to take over the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Lately, Yarvin has been trying to flip some of his newly acquired cultural capital into the real thing. Last year, he returned to Urbit as a “wartime C.E.O.,” after which several top employees resigned, and in February he raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The night before Trump’s Inauguration, I drove Yarvin to a black-tie “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by a neo-reactionary publishing house, Passage Press, which recently released Yarvin’s book “Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance,” the first of a planned four-part cycle outlining his vision for a new political regime. Its endnotes predominantly consist of QR-code links to Wikipedia pages: “Denazification,” “L’État, c’est moi,” “Presentism (historical analysis).” As I negotiated the icy streets, Yarvin explained that during the Elizabethan era the finest minds in the arts and sciences were to be found at court. When I asked if he saw a parallel with Trump’s inner circle, he burst out laughing. “Oh, no,” he said. “My God.”

Like most journalists, I had been denied entry to the ball, so I ordered a drink at a bar in the lobby. Standing next to me was a man wearing a cowboy hat and a burgundy velour suit—a Yarvin enthusiast, it turned out, named Alex Maxa. He ran a party-bus company in San Francisco, and in his free time he made memes featuring Yarvin’s likeness. He said that he was drawn to Yarvin’s work because “it makes me feel like I’ve got something that people in Washington who think they’re really smart can’t actually make a compelling argument against.” He’d wanted to go to the ball but tickets, whose price had surged to twenty thousand dollars, were now sold out. Not long afterward, I met two of Yarvin’s friends, who encouraged me, and another journalist I was with, to confidently walk into the party with them. Maxa was already inside, having taken a similar approach. “Lol I just waltzed right in by asking where the coat check was,” he texted.

Passage Press had billed the event as “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” It was not false advertising. In a banquet hall awash in pink and purple light, Anton, from the State Department, Laura Loomer, a Trump whisperer known for her anti-Muslim bigotry, and Jack Posobiec, who popularized the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, mingled with venture capitalists, crypto accelerationists, and Substack all-stars. Earlier that evening, as guests dined on seared scallops and filet mignon, Steve Bannon, the ball’s keynote speaker, called for mass deportations, the “Götterdämmerung” of the administrative state, and Mark Zuckerberg’s imprisonment.

Eight years ago, Mike Cernovich, a first-gen alt-right influencer, had co-hosted an inaugural party known as the DeploraBall, a winking reference to Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate crack about half of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” It was, by all accounts, a shambolic affair, plagued by journalists and protesters. One of Cernovich’s co-organizers, Tim Gionet, who goes by the online pseudonym Baked Alaska, was removed from his role after posting antisemitic content on Twitter. Now, at the Coronation Ball, Baked Alaska was served for dessert—a nod, it seemed, to Gionet, who was then on probation for participating in the January 6th insurrection. (He was pardoned by Trump the next day.) Cernovich pushed a baby around in a stroller and marvelled, like a proud father, at how far the movement had come. “I was one of the oldest guys in the place!” he tweeted the following afternoon. “Real right wing. High energy and high IQ.” In 2008, Yarvin, in his “Open Letter,” had called for a reactionary vanguard to form an underground political party. The Coronation Ball made it clear that this was no longer necessary. His web-addled counter-élite was now the establishment.

Yarvin was dressed in the same tuxedo, including a bright-red cummerbund, that he’d worn to a party at Thiel’s house in D.C. the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance had amiably greeted him with “You reactionary fascist!” He’d also worn the tux to his wedding last year. Yarvin’s first wife died in 2021, from a hereditary heart disease, at the age of fifty. At the ball, he was accompanied by his second wife, Kristine Militello. A former Bernie Sanders supporter and an aspiring novelist, Kristine described herself as having been “red-pilled” during the pandemic, after losing her customer-service job at an online wine retailer. She first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution, and proceeded to read everything he’d written. She sent him an admiring e-mail in 2022, seeking advice on how to break into New York’s dissident-right literary scene, and they met for drinks a few weeks later.

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.) He didn’t always express himself so quaintly. In 2011, the day after the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed sixty-nine people, many of them teen-agers, at a summer camp in Norway, Yarvin wrote, “If you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children.” He praised Breivik for targeting the right group (“communists, not Muslims”), but condemned his methods: “Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.”

Yarvin’s own recruitment efforts seemed to be working. Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who has been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. “My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,” he said.

After half an hour, I was escorted out of the party, as were other reporters throughout the evening. Security mistook Maxa, my friend from the lobby, for one of our kind, and he was ejected, too, though not before pressing through the crowd to get his photo taken with the dark elf.

Even Trump’s most pessimistic critics have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch—and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth. Elon Musk, an unelected citizen, has led a squadron of twentysomethings on a spree through the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and seizing control of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Meanwhile, the Administration has launched an assault on civil society, revoking funding at Harvard and other universities that it claims are bastions of ideological indoctrination and punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s opponents. It has expanded the machinery of immigration enforcement, deporting three U.S.-born children to Honduras, a group of Asian and Latin American immigrants to Africa, and more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they may remain until the end of their lives. U.S. citizens now find themselves with a government that claims the right to disappear them without due process: as Trump told Bukele, the President of El Salvador, during an Oval Office meeting, “Homegrowns are next.” Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas—like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy—don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies.

Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life. Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.

Some thinkers would envy the attention Yarvin is receiving. But he dismissed his influence as a “fraudulent currency” since it has yet to cash out in the revolution he desires. He poured scorn on DOGE (“so much libertarian DNA”) and Trump’s tariff plan (not mercantilist enough). In a recent essay on Substack, he criticized the decision to dispatch plainclothes ICE officers to jail college students and professors for political speech—not on moral grounds, but because the thuggish optics were likely to provoke resistance. Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.

This apparent desire for control also shows up in some of his relationships. Not long ago, I visited Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s ex-fiancée, in Berkeley. The two began dating in September, 2021, after Yarvin posted a personal ad on Substack, explaining that he’d recently lost his “widower virginity” and was looking to meet someone of “childbearing age.” Laurenson, a freelance writer and editor, replied the same day: “I have historically been a liberal but my IQ is really high, I want kids, and I’m incredibly curious to talk to you.” Yarvin went on Zoom dates with other women who answered the post—among them, Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend of the now imprisoned crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried—but he and Laurenson soon found themselves in an all-consuming romance. She told me that the ethos of her relationship with Yarvin was “ ‘We’re going to be geniuses together and have genius babies.’ I’m making fun of it a little bit, but that really was it.”

Like Yarvin, Laurenson had been a precocious child who went to college early. She’d also maintained a blog with a cult following, where, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, she wrote about sex-positive feminism, B.D.S.M., and pickup artistry. She and Yarvin fought often, sometimes about politics. Laurenson had moved away from the left, but she hadn’t fully embraced neo-reaction. When I asked her if she’d ever changed Yarvin’s mind about anything, she said she’d gotten him to stop using the N-word, at least around her. (He later told this magazine that he was not using the word in the spirit of “a Southern plantation owner.”)

The bigger source of tension, according to Laurenson, was Yarvin’s autocratic attachment style. When they fought, Laurenson said, he insisted that she provide a rational justification for ending hostilities. She felt that Yarvin’s slippery personal attacks resembled his manner in public debates. “He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul,” she told me in an e-mail, referencing the cyberattack strategy of overwhelming a server with traffic from multiple sources. James Dama, a friend of Laurenson’s who had his own falling out with Yarvin, recalled, “He would make a coarse joke about Lydia’s weight or looks, not get a laugh, and then get angry at Lydia for being too stuck up.” (Tanner, Yarvin’s first girlfriend, described a similar pattern of insults and demands.)

Laurenson and Yarvin broke up in the summer of 2022, while Laurenson was pregnant. He told me that his desire for closeness might have struck Laurenson as “overbearing and stifling,” and that he had a bad habit of making “a joke that’s sort of a barb,” but he denied that he was ever purposefully cruel during the relationship. (He added that, after the relationship ended, “my natural instinct was, I’m going to cut her down to size every time I can”—something, he noted, he was “very good at.”) A few weeks after their son was born, that December, Yarvin sued for partial custody, which he received. An ongoing family-court case remains acrimonious. “The parents are in disagreement about nearly every issue,” their mediator observed last year.

Now that they share a toddler, Laurenson spends a lot of time thinking about Yarvin’s own childhood. “He has this class-clown thing going on, where he very much craves attention,” she said. To her, it seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of “repetition compulsion,” a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality. She wondered if he’d first adopted “the monarchist thing” as a kind of intellectual sport, a bit from Usenet, and then, like the parallel world in the Borges story, it had slowly taken on a reality of its own. “Is it just like you found this place where people admire you and allow you to troll as much as you want, and then you just live in that world?” she asked.

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. “The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. “He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.”

It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it. He claims that the transition to his regime will be peaceful, even joyous, but fantasies of violence flicker throughout his work. “Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,” he wrote in a Substack post in March. “You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?”

Yarvin’s strong opinions on how the world ought to work extended to this profile. Some of his suggestions were intriguing: he floated the idea of staging a debate with one of his ex-girlfriends, and invited me to follow him to Doha for a meeting with Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Others were officious. At one point, he sent me nine texts objecting to my use of the word “extreme”—“a hostile pejorative,” he explained, which my article would be better off without. (He’d previously boasted several times in our taped conversations that he was more “extreme” than anyone in the current Administration.) A few days after the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel, he wrote to The New Yorker to complain that I’d walked in without his publisher’s permission; he said that he hoped the incident would not turn into “Watergate 2,” and referred to himself as “certainly the most media-friendly person in the scene!” (Jonathan Keeperman, his publisher at Passage Press and the host of the ball, once suggested that the Republican Party should “lamppost”—that is, lynch—“the journos,” so this was not a particularly high bar to clear.)

One morning this winter, I woke up to twenty-eight texts from Yarvin expressing concerns about my reporting technique. “The problem is that your process is slack and I can feel it generating low-quality content—because it’s not adversarial enough,” he wrote. “When the process is not adversarial, I don’t know what I am contending against.” He briefly considered whether I was “too dumb to understand the ideas,” or whether I’d succumbed to the mental self-censorship that Orwell called “crimestop.” He urged me to watch “The Lives of Others,” an Oscar-winning film that depicts the relationship between an East German playwright and a Stasi agent who is tasked with surveilling him. The Stasi agent, he wrote, “can actually write up the ideas of the playwright, *without even thinking them* It is not even that he is ‘opposed’ to the dissident ideas. It is that he does not even let them touch his brain.” In the film, the Stasi agent eventually “cracks,” after he comes to sympathize with the playwright’s views. Yarvin, presumably, was the playwright.

He said that he was coming to see me, on the other hand, as an “NPC,” or non-player character. He proposed giving me a Voight-Kampff test, the fictional exam in “Blade Runner” used to distinguish androids from humans. His version would involve the two of us debating “the ‘blank slate theory’ versus ‘racism’ ” and recording the conversation. (“By ‘racism’ I mean of course human biodiversity,” he elaborated.) When I explained that my reporting process did not include submitting to on-demand tests, Yarvin sent me a screenshot of “August 1968,” W. H. Auden’s poem about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring:

The Ogre does what ogres can Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech

He went on to say that although he’d agreed to participate in this story because “no publicity is bad publicity,” he would now try to kill it if he could.

I was struck by the contrast between his messages and the coolheaded tone he’d recommended that Thiel and other friends deploy when handling the media. After the 2013 TechCrunch article identifying Yarvin came out, Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur, proposed in an e-mail “to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them.” Yarvin dissuaded him. “What would Heartiste say?” Yarvin asked, referring to the white-nationalist pickup-artist blog “Chateau Heartiste.” “Almost always, the right alpha answer is ‘nothing.’ Say nothing. Do nothing.”

On a balmy afternoon in late February, Yarvin and his wife, Kristine, were driving down a country road in the South of France. They were accompanied by the documentarians, Brun and Díaz. “Where are we going, Kristine?” Brun asked from the passenger seat, turning the camera around to film her in the back beside me.

She said that she had only the vaguest notion. “Honestly, he just tells me everything last minute,” she explained. “It’s kind of like being a dog. You just know that you’re going in the car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna go to the dog park, or you’re gonna go to the vet, and you’ll find out when you get there.”

“Spontaneity,” Yarvin chimed in.

“That’s a word for it,” Kristine teased.

We were on our way to meet Renaud Camus, a seventy-eight-year-old novelist and pamphleteer, who, in 2011, published “The Great Replacement,” an incendiary manifesto that argued that liberal élites were behind a conspiracy to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The title phrase has since become a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world, from Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, marchers chanted, “You will not replace us,” to Christchurch, New Zealand, where, two years later, a man who’d published a manifesto with the same title as Camus’s killed fifty-one Muslims.

As we crested a hill, the walls of Camus’s castle, Château de Plieux, loomed into view. “Does anyone know if he’s related to Albert Camus?” Yarvin asked. “I think he’s not related to Albert, but he’s a lovely, old, gay, literary Frenchman.”

Brun, who is Venezuelan, wondered what he would do if Camus “has a sign that says ‘No Foreigners Allowed.’ ”

“Well, are you here to replace us?” Kristine joked. Nobody replied.

Yarvin rang an impressive metal bell beside the door, and we were soon ushered inside by Pierre Jolibert, Camus’s partner. Upstairs, Camus was waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. With his manicured white beard and brown corduroy jacket, complete with a bow tie and gold pocket-watch chain, he looked like a nineteenth-century man of letters. Speaking perfect English, with an English accent, he made it sound as though he’d had no choice but to buy the castle, which dated from the early thirteen-hundreds, after his library grew too large for his small Parisian flat. That was thirty-five years ago. Now, acknowledging the stacks of books that were overtaking his cavernous study, he said that he was running into the same problem here.

Over several glasses of champagne, Yarvin fired a series of questions at Camus, though he rarely waited long enough for his host to give a full answer. What did Camus think of Philippe Pétain? Charles de Gaulle? Napoleon III? Napoleon I? Ernst Jünger? Ernst von Salomon? Ezra Pound? Basil Bunting? More than an interaction, Yarvin, the former trivia champion, seemed to want a pat on the head for his display of learning.

After we headed downstairs for lunch—strips of sizzling duck, a quiche Lorraine, red wine—Yarvin resumed his cross-examination. Did Camus rate Thomas Carlyle? Michel Houellebecq? Louis XIV? What would he say to Charles Maurras if he were alive today? What would Dostoyevsky have thought about the Covid lab-leak theory?

Camus let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Yarvin asked a particularly odd question, but he was baffled by his guest’s repeated inquiries about Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, who Yarvin suspected was actually a man. “We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,” Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. “What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?”

Brun asked the men to move to a window so that he could shoot them from outside. As Yarvin gazed at the patchwork of neatly tended fields below, he spoke about the Great Replacement as “one of the greatest crimes” in history. “Is it greater than the Holocaust? I don’t know. . . . We haven’t seen it play out yet.” He’d been drinking since his arrival and seemed to be in an emotional state. “I have three children,” he told Camus. “Will they be basically lined up and marched into mass graves?” They had been discussing Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), which depicts an invasion of Indian migrants destroying European nations. Sobbing now, he continued, “I want my children to die in the twenty-second century. I don’t want them to experience some kind of insane post-colonial Holocaust.”

After dessert, coffee, and a rum from Guadeloupe, it was time for an evening stroll. Carrying a wooden cane, Camus led Yarvin through the small town of Plieux. Spring had arrived early: a cherry tree was blossoming with little flowers. As they passed the local church, Yarvin took out his phone to show Camus a photo of the toddler he shares with Laurenson. “The mother of that child was not my wife,” he said confidingly. A moment later, he was reading a poem by C. P. Cavafy, in tears once again.

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine said, “You can’t just ask people that!”

Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?” 

[satanfemme]

Hi everyone

My name smeer

I have 3 sons one of thim in Cairo now he studies medicine

Inshallah he will be a doctor

Now I can't send money for him to complete his study

I live in north of gaza I don't need anything expect support my son

He maked campaign for him please help him for his study and his living 🙏

Thank you for everything ❤️

https://gofund.me/db622b3a

this fundraiser is only at $506/$12,000 AUD

I'd like to ask my followers to please share and donate to this

here's a direct link:

from the fundraiser page: "Hi, I am Mohamad, a medical student from Palestine, studying in Egypt. I represented the State of Palestine in 2012 in math in Malaysia. Circumstances in Gaza forced me to lose contact with my family two months ago. I am here to share my story and to ask for your support in this stage of my life that has become more difficult than a person can imagine. I began my journey in studying medicine with a great ambition to serve my people and provide medical care. As I said in my television interview, it is a country of martyrdom, and every day we need doctors, but as the situation intensified in my country, I lost contact with my family because of the war that began on 7th of October . Now I live alone, away from loved ones and expenses. Studying is a heavy burden. I dream of graduating and achieving my dream, but with your support, I can overcome these difficulties. I am here to ask for help to cover my educational expenses. My house was bombed by the Israeli occupation, and I believe that even if the war ends, my father will still not be able to pay me tuition fees. I am grateful for every support you provide. Every dollar means a lot to me, and I promise that I will use this support transparently and in a way that helps me continue my educational journey. Thank you all in advance for your interest and support during this difficult period."

this fundraiser hasn't been verified by Palestinian bloggers as far as I can tell, but I have reason to believe it's real. and my inbox is open to Palestinian bloggers who are willing and able to verify this.

[riansdiary]

BEFORE YOU SEND AN ASK... Please check if your question can be answered here and check if what you're about to ask is in here. Thank you!

1. Can I manifest...

The answer to this question is always yes. You can manifest anything you want as long as you can imagine having it.

2. I wanna manifest ____ but...

Okay so for this, I would rather have you tell me what you need help on in manifesting without the circumstances. You can tell me what you're not understanding about it and what you're having a hard time processing about manifesting instead. More so generally like "Hey Rian, I'm not seeing it in the 3d and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I need you to understand that the only one who's keeping that in your reality is you. Why? Attention is our currency (I learned from Neyah and various people) and what you focus on always, you will get more of it.

That's really important and we need to tell everyone about this more. I had a hard time myself before because I was paying attention to what I don't want. Pay attention to your affirmations and positive thoughts and good things. This is why I like the method of following my happiness when I'm resistant and paying attention to what I don't want cause it helps me take my mind off it.

So many of my asks have this exact question. While I'm not angry at it, of course not. It just gets repetitive and they're mostly paying attention to what they don't want and accepting the 3d as a fact. See your desires and affirmations as facts instead. Accept and internalize that more. Please do not contradict your affirmations. Keep saying yes and agreeing to them being true instead. Leave the 3d alone. It doesn't have any meaning except the meaning you give it.

You were saying it's done I have this thing then suddenly you saw something in the 3d and you gave it meaning.

"Oh this means he doesn't want me."

"Oh my God no it's not working!"

"Oh no where is it? I affirmed so much, we should be rich by now"

You contradicted yourself and gave it meaning but you could have done this instead:

You don't accept it as a fact. You keep thinking your desire is a fact already.

For SP:

"It doesn't have any meaning. Oh he's still so in love with me.

For money: looking at your wallet with not much money.

"Oh I don't have much cash, all my money is in the bank and I like to use credit cards. Been using my black card lately. I'm so rich."

Stop letting a dead reality that's just reflecting you to change your mind. Try and practice this with small desires.

IF 👏 YOU 👏 SAY 👏 IT'S 👏 IN 👏 YOUR 👏 REALITY 👏 THEN 👏 IT 👏 IS 👏

You're the boss! Don't forget that. It's not "the 3d is the boss", sometimes everyone needs that reminder. Seek validation from your mind! You say how it is! You just need to keep going inwards. Even just reminding yourself gently whenever you think about it is enough.

IT'S 👏 ALREADY 👏 HERE 👏

3. I have a stubborn mind.

This is not an attack. I just wrote this here to remind you that ALL OF YOUR THOUGHTS ARE AFFIRMATIONS and that YOU CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANT TO BE TRUE OR NOT.

Please, let's stop saying things like this. You are persisting on a negative affirmation. You could accept instead that you believe and accept your affirmations as facts immediately.

Just wanted to remind everyone that you just need to change your mind and your assumptions.

4. The law of assumption is fake.

Then why are you here? I've answered these kinds of asks multiple times and it's getting annoying. If that's your belief then it's fine but why are you here in Loablr then? It doesn't make any sense. So don't believe it, if that's what you want. You don't need to go to multiple loa bloggers and tell them your BS beliefs for no reason.

5. Cute little messages for me 🫶

I just wanna say thank you to all the anons who have been extra nice to me and told me kind things! Thank you so much!!! It really makes my day and I appreciate it! 🥰

6. Hateful, mean or kill yourself asks

Please refrain from doing this. You can do it to me all you want, I won't be affected at all because I know I'm in the right but please don't do this to any other Loa bloggers. It's harmful. I'm warning you now, I can be savage when it comes to any person doing this. You're just wasting your time on something negative and bad. I won't stop telling you that it's WRONG to do this.

If you don't have anything nice to say, kindly click away from my blog or someone else's. Be kind. I know you could be going through something so I can understand that but it's still a bad thing to do so please stop this, thank you.

[soundgarden]

Ill keep it intentionally vague bc I dont want to start shit. Theres this one blog on here that starting popping up in my mutual circle a few years ago when we were pretty popular in a certain niche. He starts following all of us, is CONSTANTLY in our replies, sending asks around new year about how thankful he is for our blogs. But hes turning like crazy pushy, always sending asks about a certain spn character hes obsessed with (iykyk), until eventually someone tells him rlly nicely like hey idgaf abt that character, its probably better if you send these asks someone else, bc I dont have anything to reply. He starts like freaking out, and talking about people vagueing him, etc etc, until eventually the whole mutual group just kinda agrees hes kind of weird, and we start blocking him. again were a pretty niche group, so whatever. But the thing is, I still see him doing the same thing, but with completely different popular mutual groups about completely different topics. Like years later I see him in replies of SO many popular bloggers here acting all buddy buddy. Its clearly some pattern with him being obsessed with becoming part of some popular "in-group". And Im not gonna say anything, bc I guess its not rlly harmful just weird and annoying right, but its so strange seeing him hop from group to group for years now, and always so desperate for mutuals and some fake internet currency of popularity😶

"i'll keep it intentionally vague" whole time it's extremely specific

[carlocarrasco]

More than P783 million deposited through BSP’s coin machines

Over P783 million worth of coins have been deposited through the many coin deposit machines (CoDMs) of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) as of June 23, 2024, as published on their website. Based on the latest statistics, a total of  P783,628,810.29 (10.7% higher than the previous month’s count of P707,661,554.41) in coins got deposited into BSP machines on 191,804 transactions (9.8% higher…

[sexysadie23]

some of the bloggers on here are so arrogant to people who send in asks which only contained a harmless question. I swear, some tumblrs just use certain asks to seem tough or to boost their ego. Do you need to fawn over your fans? No. But don’t for a second think that what you say won’t affect them!! Being a bitch was never and will never be cool. y’all need to be humbled. You only have a following because people have chosen to like you, and you need to be grateful for that. Attention is today’s most valuable currency and when people give you theirs - it is important to remember who you were before the followers.

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson, the Engineer's Thumb

Crimes in Context: Counterfeiting, circa 1889

What coins were the Stark-Becher gang trying to make, anyway? And did they actually need a person squishing hydraulic press to do it?

Most of the cash in circulation in Victorian England would have been coins, so it's time to refresh our memories on what they all are, since I last addressed currency smaller than a pound in The Man with the Twisted Lip. We will be restricting ourselves to denominations that the Stark-Becher gang may have been minting, based on the comment that the hydraulic press was necessary to make coins that were previously minted in silver.

Imperial Currency Definitions

Pound/Quid/Sovereign: Not applicable, the Sovereign coin is gold, but it's the base unit of the currency we're dealing with. It also would have been hard to pass as genuine just because it's a large denomination - the era's equivalent of a hundred dollar bill. Indeed, our Bank of England inflation calculator returns a modern value of £107.

Crown: Five shillings / a quarter pound. Represented by a silver coin. Probably the largest coin you'd make change for without being annoyed by it.

Shilling: 1/20th of a pound. A silver coin. Crowns and Shillings are our most likely candidates, as they're in common use in 1889 and is the kind of cash an average man might have on hand. I personally think shillings are the most likely coin to counterfeit, as a lot of accounting of people's wages, expenses, etc. in this time period is written as pounds / shillings / pennies (L/s/d) and silver pennies (And their horrible spawn of sixpence, twopence, etc) are probably not worth the effort. Also, while there were silver pennies in circulation, the fact that things like silver twopence were minted for maundy money makes the timeline and consistency of their minting beyond my pay grade as a blogger. And probably confusing for a coiner to get exactly right, given the payoff. Hydraulic press:

Modern (paper*) money is printed with several aspects that make it harder to reproduce: the exact fiber content of the paper, the multi layered and detailed design (with parts that can only be seen under UV light, parts that can only be seen with a magnifying glass, etc.), the embossed parts of the print design, and the exact chemical components of the ink can be analyzed to see if a note is authentic. The ink in US dollars also contains a smattering of heavy metals that aren't great for human health, so I don't recommend consuming money in any way - don't lick it, don't snort things off it, don't put it in your blender for a science fair project. It would be chemically somewhat dangerous to counterfeit modern currency at home, assuming you got anywhere close to the right ink.

*Some countries use polymer, but same difference. It will kill your blender, though.

The Victorians did... none of that, really. The idea of designing money to be harder to fake was already around, but metal coins can only be produced to a certain degree of precision with the tools that were available in the 1800's: you essentially heat a disk of the correct metal (a blank) and press it with a stamp. The hydraulic press would, of course, squash blanks between two plates of stamps precisely, and with great force.

Both silver and gold have relatively low melting points (under 2,000 degrees F / close to 1,000 C) and are malleable at lower temperatures than the iron or steel of a hydraulic press. Silver amalgam (a silver/mercury alloy) has an even lower melting point, so it would be even easier to fit to a mold.

Essentially, anybody who knew much about molding metal and could get a precise-ish model of the coin in question would make pretty convincing money. A hydraulic press large enough to fit three grown men between the plates of may have been overkill.

[lamentingocean]

Mafia Jaha x Reader

Tw: riding, humping, slight abuse, verbal abuse, slut name calling, money bragging and cheating, all of this is insane pls help me, drugs, casino crap, SEXUAL EVERYTHING HAHAH (I'm sick asf)

+Made by Your Favorite Blogger- Ocean!+

___________________________________________

I must always obey what jaha says. I was only a small worker in a restaurant until I saw him pull up to the drive thru with bucks of money on his hands If he's trying to shove it on my face to give me a powerful surge of jealousy or something. But no. even though he's a red flag with a suit that costs 500K. he's incredibly attractive.

This is only a backstory.

His long black hair....his red eyes that can win a beauty battle with the roses in the snow pinterest pictures, and his chin that can stab a brick wall in a second got you falling in silent love. having heart eyes directly at him if you're a yandere to your senpai. But it's a chance to take him from all these thots all over him.

he set up a party poster all over the town, just to celebrate his elimination of a cartel he has been enemies with for many years, so he's happy about it, nobody knows that he is a proficient badass at martial arts. especially with a sword, but let's not talk about that right now. I took my day off work to go to the party.

I used all of my currency to buy an expensive dress and used my last quarters to buy this popular makeup swarming around social media, it's flower knows it makeup just to look good for a man for a man I met on a fast food thru. but you got to do what you got to do. I showed up to his house. looking good and sexy for one man that can shoot you with one bullet.

Weak ass.

I caught one glimpse of him, and there he is. mooching off his booze and bathing himself with money. he can even take off his outfit and pour money of his cock if he wants to, but no. he drank aphrodisiacs and sugar at the same time with a mix of his favorite booze. but those same heart eyes still set on him like a target, but as soon I left. I saw him glimpse at me at the last second when I walked to expose his house more.

he was following me. thinking he's slick by hiding in corners pretending to avoid me, but everything I move to the crowd full of people, I hear footsteps behind me, and it's starting to terrify me. it's like a ghost wanting to assault me from behind me, but I can't see it. I entered the bathroom to take a tinkle.

Take a piss while I'm scrolling on tumblr. Someone knocked on the door while they could hear my audible trickling in the toilet, the person busted it. it's jaha.

his fists slammed against my hands to the wall. he's obviously drunk, horny, and on a sugar rush due to all the drugs he's taken. he's drooling from the mouth, and his eyes look like a white dirty condom on an abandoned hotel room floor. but he also looks like he's dead with those eyes. but you also smelt a stench coming from him, and it wasn't his body. or his breath.

His cock was frothing of pre-cum, dripping full of saliva of different woman, its also twitching uncontrollably which caught you off gaurd. he slowly slapped his hands on your thighs and forcefully opened your legs. At the same time. I didn't really overreact to his frothing mouth full of drugs in his breath that could possibly kill bugs and pigs. Two of the most disgusting things on earth.

he chuckled in delight to my face of no emotion to my pussy exposure, he went way beyond my pussy lips to leave his cock enter the door of my womb, i screamed out in lust, and then noticed the door behind him. it's open and then you started to overthink that people were gonna recording the mafia leader fucking a random girl in the bathroom just for internet comedy. he did your exact wish. he closed the door behind him. dispite being functional at a disgustingly rush of sex drugs and booze bottles.

he thrust his cock right in and out of your pussy lips. groaning at your squelching hot wet pussy enveloping in his dick skin. his cock throbbed inside you. I tried to cease my moans from my mouth by covering it. but he felt so damn good that I started to slowly move my fingers to rub my clit. he fucked you so hard that if people walk by the bathroom then they can hear sounds coming from inside. a small spray of pre-cum went out of your pussy since he's slamming into you so hard. He didn't even give you a warning.

he spread his thick load all of you, going from your chest, hand, arm, and face. once he finished the rest of his climax. his fingers flicked out and dug into your insides like he shoved a booze bottle into someone's ass. it was at this point that I couldn't hold in my moans anymore and just let it out without a care in the world. his fingers were coated with your vagina juices. his fingers were so goddamn big. That you cummed all over his fingers in such a short amount of time.

I'm writing this now in my free time since I was supposed to cook for jaha right before he went back to his headquarters. and that I'm probably slacking on my cooking time. I must do everything for him since he called me a bitch before. BUT he was only in a bad mood since some of his employees got shot in the chest by a new cartel targeting jaha for over 70 million dollars.

I went downstairs. I'm overall a housewive in my new life with a mafia man. Jaha is in the kitchen, throwing his money around like it's an addiction to flex around his own wife. until he glanced at you. "Where is my food lousy bitch. I have been standing here for the past 20 minutes." I took his attitude as an affection of love. I bow down as a form of respect and love. "I'm sorry babe..I'll get your lunch started soon♡"

"Ok, well. I need you to hurry up. I got places to be and things to do." I couldn't make his lunch that fast.

"Do you just want the leftovers then?" I suddenly felt a slap on my face that felt like a brick. he chuckled with his anger powdered voice.

"fuck the leftovers. I want a new dish. if you can make my dish properly. I will make sure to put you in a wheelchair just how you are impressively horny you are for my cock. just like we were fucking in that party I had 4 years ago. Do you have that clear slut?"

"Yes sir..." I held the slap in my face.

'"Actually...on second thought.."

I got picked up and thrown to the wall to see jaha's smirk of sexual addiction. he spoke out in words that shocked my hormones to the core. It's like it activated just by these single words. "Let's fuck. I don't care about work anymore other than to fuck you endlessly like a cum hungry slut." he zipped down his pants to see his stiff cock smelling clean like it's a human itself.

He slapped it right on my face, which could leave a mark, he glanced right at my face begging me to suck his dick off like a vacuum until he can cum endlessly until he can no longer cum again. drain his dick down. your mouth was filled with his cock. I suck it up and down just so I can catch a glimpse of jaha's horny nature, and it did work, but his dick got bigger due to getting harder by your natural mouth massage by his dick, he groaned once again, rubbing your locks in as if he's mesmerized by your beauty. his dick tip started to pump his pre-cum into the hole of your mouth so you could swallow it every time you suck him off up and down. He threw his head back in unforgivable lust, radiating arousal for your mouth tricks. his hair wicked back and forth just he can spread his groans all around the empty walls of our expensive home. his pre-cum leaked out of your mouth and started to overfill your taste buds with it. until he actually did shoot his gun shot like load right inside your mouth, pumping it so full that you nearly choked at his cum load. right before his load.

he covered his mouth and rolled his eyes back with his sweat dripping down his expensive suit, with his face feeling so hot of toxic love that he's burning in poison in the midst of calling his wife a bitch uncontrollably. he did a finger signal to come over to my lap and make out with me.

"we aren't over"

(MY X READERS ARE GETTING MORE DIRTIER OML)

[selamat-linting]

just saw this dumbass on the dash saying how sweet it is that a guy went out to prom with his gay friend, screenshot his twitter and everything, i followed his twitter too ye dipshit he literally shits on random OF models who criticized his work and said he posted that gay prom stuff because people called him sexist. and this lame blogger also posted that its sooo cute that he is insulting people with their native language. hello, are we not forgetting the time he took potshots at his female coworkers and seniors? are we not forgetting that time he made fun of japanese names? are we ignoring the crypto currency pump and dump scam he did? he is not some kind of "i hate everyone equally" type of lovable cunt, he's just a cunt.

look, i still like the guy's work and booty buttcheeks but its fucking cringe to do damage control on this man's reputation. youre not getting paid for this!

anyway, never follow the main tag of any fandom. stupid people live there!

[mariacallous]

A presidential signing bonanza

Vladimir Putin signed into law on Thursday more than 50 laws on Thursday, including several new prohibitions and expansions of the state’s repressive powers. Thanks to the president's approval, these eight pieces of legislation are now set to become the law of the land.

Jailing soldiers (without court orders) for using smartphones: Unit commanders now have the authority to lock up their soldiers for up to 10 days (or 15 days for repeat offenses) if they catch them using banned personal gadgets, such as smartphones. This act previously required transporting the suspects to a garrison court for a formal ruling.

An expanded definition of ‘undesirability’: The authorities can now designate any organization in Russia as “undesirable” if foreign state entities played any role in the organization’s foundation or have even participated in its operations. State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said the law is necessary to close a “loophole” that prohibited the government from designating local, Russian organizations, not just foreign groups.

No more selling energy drinks to kids: Effective March 2025, Russian vendors are prohibited from selling non-alcoholic tonic drinks, including energy drinks, to minors. The new restriction is intended as a public health measure.

Legalized cryptocurrency mining: Russia will introduce a special registry to issue permits for individuals and legal entities to “mine” cryptocurrency — the electricity-demanding process of using computer power to solve the complex mathematical problems needed to validate and secure transactions on a blockchain, earning digital currency as a reward. In mid-July, Putin expressed concerns about falling behind in cryptocurrency regulations. The new legislation also reserves some regional authorities’ right to ban crypto-mining where energy shortages are a concern.

The Dude can no longer abide: Effective September 1, 2025, “propagating drug use in art and literature” without warnings will be punishable by steep fines. The new restrictions exempt all works released before August 1, 1990, and content “where drugs are an integral part of the artistic concept justified by the genre.” The new censorship also does not apply to “materials related to investigative activities, scientific, educational, medical, or pharmaceutical publications.”

More deportation powers for the police: Internal Affairs Ministry officials will now have the authority to expel foreigners from the country without court oversight for certain misdemeanors. The list of administrative offenses includes illegal drug use, the public consumption of alcohol, and disseminating so-called “gay propaganda” (though officers must “directly witness signs of violations” in this last case). Deported foreigners will also be added to a registry that bans them from registering businesses in Russia, getting married, buying and registering property, opening bank accounts, and obtaining or renewing a driver’s license. 

‘Trash-streams’ banned: In Russia, “trash streams” usually feature bloggers abusing drugs and alcohol or performing humiliating or violent acts in return for donations from viewers. The new law prohibits the distribution of “trash stream” content, and crimes committed during these broadcasts can be prosecuted as aggravated offenses under 10 different felony statutes. Convicted “trash streamers” will face steep fines and the possible confiscation of their electronic equipment.

Naturalized citizenship revoked for refusing military registration: The Internal Affairs Ministry will now be required to provide records about all men approved for receiving Russian citizenship. Lawmakers who sponsored the bill said the new condition for maintaining naturalized citizenship is needed to address “widespread public outrage” against immigrants who get a passport and then evade military duty.

[saintsir4n]

3. Eyes wide shut

WARNINGS: MENTIONS OF PEDOPHILIA

WINNIE slammed her locker shut and turned to the little rugrat that hadn't stopped following her around since she arrived on campus. Since she had just a few minutes before the third period started she thought she could give him the time of day.

"What do you want, young Sheldon?" She dared to ask, clutching her books.

"Can't I talk to a mentor of this great establishment?" Milo Sparks, everyone.

He might've been small due to his preadolescent age but he was deadly, he knew things and knowledge was power and coming from such a slimy bloodline, who would've expected any less?

"I only focus on one poor and hopeless child at a time," Winnie spoke, sighing as she towered over him.

"Does Zoya know you made it up?" He retorted, holding his coat close to his chest and staring up at her dark brown eyes.

Winnie's sharp stare didn't bother him like she hoped. He was a weasel, a cute one but a weasel nonetheless. He actually preferred it when she didn't wear shades, even if she wasn't easy to read if levelled the playing field.

"Does she know that you hacked into her phone?" She replied, quietly yet the fierce tone had his eyes narrowing.

He stepped closer aware of the students who passed through the halls on their first break of the day.

His brows furrowed. "Only on your request."

"Yes and I found a few things from that so thank you," she rushed out, wanting to be rid of his presence. "Is that why you're here?"

"You owe me," Milo declared and she knew it was the truth.

"I sent you a grand when you did the job."

"Money isn't the currency I want," and you know that, "Secrets are my preferred form of payment."

"Name the person," Winnie demanded, growing more impatient, despite having respect for his craft.

He pondered for a moment, glancing around, "Ginny."

Her face hardened, "No."

"Worth a try. Zoya?"

Winnie didn't have any loyalty to the girl, especially since it had been a week since she last heard from her. Their relationship ever since the heiress prevented Zoya's exile had been rather estranged, like any normal relationship Winnie's opinion.

"You could hack her phone if you want the dirt," Winnie thought aloud.

"No, I want her to ask me for help," to require my services so then I can gain another favor. That went without saying.

A brief look of pride flickered through her eyes which had Milo smirking.

"When?" Winnie gave in, tapping her heel against the floor.

"Soon."

"Deal now scram, talking to short people cramps my neck," Winnie didn't leave any room for objection.

Luckily Milo already took a step back, "Always a pleasure."

With him now on his way, Winnie grabbed her phone, apprehensive of any gossipgirl updates. She always received the most whenever she was on school grounds which had her wondering, was the anonymous blogger truly a student or another? Back when she was in 8th grade she started up many fake pages all dedicated to Julian's worst outfits. She was protected due to the best software for parents provided so kids like Milo Sparks couldn't even attempt to hack her servers without an arrest warrant.

A dark smile tickled at her lips because of the memory.

"Pooh bear ready for religious studies and classics?"

She glanced up to see a familiar scruffy uniform, belonging to none other than Max Wolfe.

Winnie knew there was no point trying to correct his god-awful nickname for her. It started back in kindergarten and stuck, despite the threats she made against his name, the tweets and hashtags that hit her fans hating on him with every post. He was unfazed which pissed her off more.

"Of course, learning the most infamous ways to control the masses has always been my favourite," she stated, flashing him a fake smile as they started walking towards their class.

He chuckled, "Your mind is terrifying."

"Just like your body count."

"Is that shade or slut shaming?"

"Both."

He feigned appreciation, "The love you give me is endless."

"Keep telling yourself that," she grumbled, checking the time. "Judging by your attire Ginny received a mediocre fuck."

"Why? Jealous?"

"She's hot but not my type," she rebutted.

He smirked, "And who is? One of the many unanswered questions on this Earth, what gets the gorgeous Winifred Dubois dripping like the Hudson River?"

"Easy. People who look like me," and Winnie wasn't lying.

The pair walked past Audrey and Aki, the former's blue eyes shot daggers at the girl, whilst her boyfriend's face scrunched up in confusion before they turned away.

Max mumbled, "Well that's a lot to unpack."

"You do that. Don't pay attention in class. Fail," she snickered, allowing him to push open the door for her, revealing a few students who had already gotten there early.

"Who said I'll fail?" Max questioned, fully amused as they took their seats at the front of the class.

"Let me guess Wolfe, you'd get on your hands and knees for a grade?" Winnie set her textbook and notebook on her desk whilst he did nothing but take off his empty bag and settle it on the back of his chair.

"No different from your parents getting out their chequebooks is it?" Max's smug smile was so slappable but she conceded just this once and hummed.

"Touché."

Their teacher along with the rest of the class all filed into the room just as the bell rang, irritating the young heiress, who shifted in her seat. Her nails tapped the desk growing louder until their teacher, Mr Caparros started doing what he was paid to do. Max turned to her and smacked her hands, only gaining a sharp glare in retaliation, which made him laugh into his own.

"Everyone take their seats," Mr Caparros calmly said and with reluctance the rest of the students did.

The class went on as normal, with him retailing insightful facts and quotes without using the PowerPoint for help. Max didn't even take out a pen, no his gaze, one that might be described as heated, stayed on the man, trailing up and down his form.

The heiress next to him, occasionally took pictures of her notebook for her Instagram story and one of her 'private' Snapchat stories which contained over 200 people.

Winnie then noticed the lust-filled sparkle in Max's eyes, that wasn't surprising, but what came as a revolting shock was that their teacher was trying to suppress his whenever he looked their— no — Max's way. Turned out she was wrong, she wouldn't be learning about the cult following of millions of people, no, this was a different kind of lesson.

How to stop a predator.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

(@gossipgirl tweeted)

This just in: Manhattan's elite learning the world's oldest lesson. Those who go digging for the truth might not like what they find.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

"I'm at dumbo hall and guess who I've seen tongue fucking some random by the bar?" Ginny spoke excitedly through the phone.

"Gin I don't care," Winnie put her on speakerphone and picked up a nail file after putting down her laptop.

She was situated on the balcony attached to her room, a blanket bunched around her waist as she surveyed the horizon.

"Monet."

Winnie stilled and exhaled a jarring breath. We're not a couple so why do I feel so pissed off?

"And do you have the name of who she was mouth fucking?" She spat, picking up her phone to stalk Monet's socials.

Ginny giggled, "Oh so now you care? Interesting."

"Who was it?" the heiress' fingers practically punched her screen.

"Some random, didn't you hear me?" Ginny paused, growing curious, "I thought you hated Monet? Or is she the one that's tickling your bean?"

"No," Winnie snapped.

"Sure. You can tell me if you were."

Winnie took a moment to reply, and instead of coming clean, she deflected, "Moving on. Your used condom of a man is how do I put it — getting played like a fiddle by a teacher."

Ginny choked on her cocktail, "What?!"

"There's speculation."

"Is this you? Are you the one speculating?"

"Maybe. But am I ever wrong?" Winnie scoped Luna's finsta to see Monet making out with some... random.

How disgusting. Winnie kept telling herself that she wasn't mad. Wasn't jealous. But was that the case?

"Yes."

"When?" Winnie snorted when she didn't hear a response. "You're trying to come up with something aren't you?"

"Maybe, but I doubt a teacher would do something like that." the alcohol was certainly talking. Ginny wasn't exactly surprised by the turn of events, considering she was hit on by a teacher a couple of years back and the man in question was hastily fired and fled the country.

Winnie knew she was choosing to forget, "You know they have, so when this comes out and I'm right you're gonna be thanking me."

Ginny sighed, "Poor Max."

Winnie scoffed, "Poor me, I had to see them eye fucking during class."

"If you're right —"

"—I am —"

"Only expose it when I know he's okay please."

"I'll think about it."

She heard Ginny sigh from the other side, "Fine."

Winnie hung up and angrily pressed on another contact.

Winnie

Kissing commoners all

because of a disagreement.

From: M

It wasn't a disagreement.

It was a violation of my guidance.

Winnie

Fine. Stick to your unremarkable

taste in women. No more fuel

from me.

From: M

I'm not biting the bait.

Winnie

You won't be biting anything

for a while.

She got up off the chair, walked in and then out of her room and out onto the hallway, feening for a snack but as she approached the top of the stairs she glanced over the balcony hearing muffled voices along with the faint sound of barking no. More meetings at this time? It was almost 11 pm.

She saw her mother emerge from her office, her father and another man in tow.

A man she recognised.

"Good to see you again Margaux, Luc," his gravelly voice spoke.

"William," her father patted his shoulder.

William Van Der Bilt? What was he doing here? Winnie wondered. She'd have to do her monthly spying on her parents a week early. 

She heard Margaux softly laugh, "Nice to see you. Tell Nathaniel that his work is inspirational. It's been years since he was first appointed."

Winnie rolled her eyes at her parent's asslicking.

"Young Winifred might follow in his footsteps. The first female mayor of the city," William replied.

Luc disagreed, "She's been too busy learning from us, the inner workings of our legacy."

"That's true I suppose."

"Similar with your boy."

William nodded, "Billy?" He chuckled, "I should hope so. But he only focuses on lacrosse nowadays."

"Kids eh?" They all chuckled at Luc's response. "Have a lovely night."

"We'll speak soon at the next luncheon," William insisted, bidding them both farewell as he was escorted off the estate, leaving Winnie taking a step back.

What the fuck was that about?

___

"You told gossipgirl that my family sells placebos?" Monet whisper-yelled to the Dubois heiress in the main library.

Winnie put back a book, "That could've been anyone. Allegations like that could be taken to court. It's defamation of character."

"Your character is highly problematic so that won't be a problem," Monet's lips taunted Winnie, they were as frustrating as they were enticing.

"You're being mean," Winnie remarked, shrugging at the scoff she received,  "You know I like it when you're like that but as of now, you're public property."

Monet was more than offended, she was hurt by the insinuation, "Watch it. Just because I kissed another girl doesn't mean you can slut shame me like we're on some CW show."

"No, it just means you don't belong to me."

"I never belonged to you."

Winnie silently cursed, recognising the look in her eyes, making her almost feel bad.

So she said, "Then I guess you loved to trip and fall between my legs whenever you felt like it."

"We're not a couple, might I remind you. You said it yourself. You can't pretend to like me enough to keep me on your hook. I'm not at your beck and call, and you can't stand that," Monet snapped, stepping closer and unintentionally inhaling her signature scent.

"I can't stand a lot of things, dating a follower of one of them, so I guess you're right just this once. I'm glad we're not a couple."

Winnie took Monet's astonishment as her sign to strut away, keeping her composure as she surveyed the aisles, then grumbled when she caught Luna and Zoya at the entrance table.

From what it seemed, tips were being exchanged, why else would Luna's botox needle be out?

"Traitor."

Zoya and Luna jumped back when the Dubois teen materialised in front of them.

The freshman gulped at the look in her eyes, "She was giving me tips on —"

"I don't care," Winnie shut it down, then nodded at her classmate, "Luna."

Luna smoldered, "Winifred."

"I guess that Zugly hashtag has got you desperate," Winnie observed, eyes zeroing in on the Zoya.

Luna was disgusted by the insult, "Excuse you, I'm not the second choice."

"Yet," Winnie countered, her stare hardened as she manoeuvred around the table, "Try to have fun with the woke parade."

Zoya and Luna watched her walk out of view.

"Doesn't she intimidate you?" the freshmen squeaked.

"No comment, although you should aspire to be as intimidating as that, without the casual bigotry that gets you cancelled quicker than Rachel Zegler who can't catch a fucking break."

___

"Make it quick, I'm off to trick a blonde," Winnie impatiently rocked on her heels as she stood by Ginny's locker.

The Wellington blonde scoffed, "And I thought I was your fave."

"Nothing personal Gin."

And Ginny knew her smile was farthest from genuine so she said, "I'm here to tell you that dirt you got from Pygmy Sparks is explosive. Zoya's popularity is rising despite the backlash. You should use it soon, or when she becomes a problem."

"She's already a problem, but she's not ours," Winnie stated, leaning against the lockers and looking out of the busy courtyard.

"So? Use it for destructive. The catalyst to another battle."

A grin threatened to break out on Winnie's face, "Do you hate the preteen?"

"Not hate. Just find her inclusivity nauseating," Ginny argued, applying some gloss.

"Careful, anyone hears you saying that and you'll be judged faster than you did when you went to the Maldives during COVID and wore a diamond mask," Winnie replied, stifling a laugh.

Sometimes she found that coming from wealth and privilege wasn't all that it was cracked up to be and that some people AKA her closest confidant lacked brains.

Only some but still, it was hilarious.

"It was a mask," Ginny huffed out, shutting her locker to face her friend.

"Once that really stops the virus spreading right?" Winnie drawled, "Just listen. I'll release that tape of her whenever I want to. Just keep an eye on your lover boy. I know the teachers at this school are weird. But predatory? That's something else entirely and that needs to be shut down."

The blonde folded her arms, "Who knew you cared for Max."

Winnie grimaced, "I care for chaos, only when I cause and simultaneously thrive off of it."

"There's that sociopathic nature, and here I thought you were getting character development."

Winnie rolled her eyes at the girls teasing, "I've been tested and I'm fine."

"Don't lie to yourself," Ginny called out, smirking as her friend strutted away, "know yourself or whatever Drake said."

"Shut up!"

Winnie's struts grew louder as she neared her namesake library. Gossip Girl was quite quiet today and she needed noise, so she messaged the account and made sure they stayed tuned for a tip.

She turned up her nose when she had to push open the door, usually, she would have someone else do that for her, but she was on a time crunch and tennis practice was in 20 minutes.

Her lips quirked up in a sly grin upon seeing a mop of blonde hair.

Aurdrey's bangs were the next thing that came into view and the book she was reading was next.

Winnie's strides stopped when she stood on the opposite side of the table the blonde sat at.

The heiress cleared her throat but was ignored.

So she said, "Oh come on, we all know you're not reading anything, put the book down and speak to me like a big girl."

"Your condescending tone is aggravating and I tend to avoid people like you," The Hope teen snided, annoyed by her presence.

Winnie gasped, slapping her hand against her chest gaining the attention of those around them.

"People like me... you mean black people!" the blonde scowled at her words, "For shame Hope. And I thought we were in progressive times. I just wanted to say hi, but it's clear you only can stomach being around the lighter bunch... take care and do better."

She excited the library, grinning down at the recording on her phone and faintly hearing the commotion behind her. She pressed send and it was only a matter of time before a gossip girl blast would appear.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

(@gossipgirl just tweeted)

Despite Miss Hope mixing her roots in the various palettes our latest source tells me that maybe she isn't as inclusive as we all thought. Turns out having money isn't the only that can win you St. Audrey's approval. You must have...let's say... a certain glow to your skin.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

She slapped a hand over her mouth, laughing at the tweet. Fuck trigonometry, she was gonna have a field day with all the retweets and hashtags.

Her laughter unfortunately beckoned Julian over. The Calloway girl stormed out of her class and was scouring the school for the girl in question.

"Dubois!"

She snapped her head to the side when she heard her name as did a crowd of students in their free period.

"Oh shit, I thought you were Caesar," Winnie mocked, putting her phone into her pocket and mischievously beaming at the other influencer.

"Cut the shit, Dubois," Julian snapped, holding her phone showcasing that Audrey was a trending topic on Twitter. "Are you done? Fucking with my friends?" her questions earned more laughter, "What's so funny?"

"The way you phrased that question, but if you are demanding an answer, You really don't know the half of it," Winnie replied shaking her head.

Their bickering had people pulling out their phones to record.

Julian reeled back, "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh nothing, have fun with your travel-sized Paris Hilton," Winnie taunted, backing away.

"Audrey is not a racist!" 

"And neither is the Confederate army!"

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

(@gossipgirl tweeted)

Spotted: Julian Calloway being dragged away by Manhattan's richest heiress. It's clear to me that JC hasn't learnt that it ain't over to the cunning lady sings and Winifred looks like she's warming up her vocals.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Tonight was the Van Der Bilt's charity luncheon; a small get-together, policitans were going to be the majority, which made Winnie question why the hell her family were attending. Sure the Dubois' and the Van Der Bilts were friendly, they had to be, oil was a political debate as it is a socio-economic one.

So that's why Winnie stood in the foyer, dressed in a nice black Versace number, and hair curled to the side like she was a 50s movie star. Her fans were gonna eat it up. Her father was already in their car outside, but she was currently being reprimanded by her mother for having a certain guest around. 

"Yes Mother, don't worry, I won't embarrass you in front of the Van Der Bilts."

"Then get her out of here," Margaux angrily whispered, adjusting her pearls and tugging on her wrap.

Winnie was amazed by her mother's silk press, it effortlessly swayed with every word.

"I need 10 minutes and that's it," she tried, almost flinching back at the rage in Margaux's eyes.

"Fine, then meet us outside. And you get 5 minutes, nothing more or I'll tell Caesar to drag you out."

"How maternal," Winnie grumbled, turning around and walking into the sitting area, where she found Monet playing with Abaddon.

She signalled for a maid to take him away so Monet's attention was solely on her.

Monet's face lit up at her attire as she stood from the chair and made her way in front of the heiress, smirking and looking up and down.

"How tempting," she looks glamorous, she thought, reaching out to tuck a thick strand before her ear.

Winnie shuddered at her touch, making goosebumps kiss her skin.

A warm feeling skimmed against her chest, "Obviously."

Monet playfully rolled her eyes, "How long do we have?"

"We've got 5 minutes. Why are you here Miss De Haan, to get me to change Hope's narrative?" Winnie mocked, then sucked in a deep breath when Monet's fingers traced her collarbone.

"I don't care about that. It was hilarious. But stop sending tips into gossip girl, it's not on the theme for you," Monet's voice was more alluring than any dress she could wear.

"Because you know me so well," Winnie mocked, wanting to move away but she couldn't.

In fact, she wanted to bring Monet along to the Luncheon but she knew how many bridges that could burn.

"I'd like to think so," Monet murmured, pressing a kiss to her neck, then jawline and ever so close to her lips.

Winnie rasped, "Sex doesn't mean you know me."

"But it does tell me how sensitive you can be or how to make you cry," the whimper that escaped the Dubois heiress's lips nearly made her drop to her knees. "Look, I'll let go of the placebo slander," Monet batted her lashes, "If you tell me what you and Milo Sparks were discussing yesterday."

And like a bucket of cold water, Monet's suggestion dragged Winnie kicking and screaming from their fantasy.

"No."

Monet huffed, "Ah, my least favourite word from you."

"I would apologise but I don't want to. Go and ask your new lover for that info," Winnie's amusement had faded away.

"Would you get over that shit? Don't tell me your jealous... still?"

"I wasn't jealous."

Monet rose a brow, "Possessiveness isn't a symptom of jealousy?"

"No. I'm not telling you anything. You'll go and tell your leader."

"For the last time, I am not a follower. I'm her P.R. representative," Monet fiercely stated, "all these insults will just make me stay away."

Winnie deeply sighed, turning away, "Fine. I'm sorry."

Monet was stunned, never had she received a genuine apology from the Dubois heiress. She needed to savour the moment.

"It's fine. I guess I only like slander when we're between the sheets."

"I know," Winnie suppressed the urge to smile. It was hard, especially around Monet, but it had to be done.

"But what you need to know, is all the theatrics between you and Julian won't last long before she's back on top." Monet said, rolling back her shoulders, "I'm not warning you. It comes from a place of..."

Winnie stared with furrowed brows, "What?"

"It's a caution," Monet rushed out before it could be questioned. "Be kinder."

Winnie's shoulders uncharacteristically slumped, "So don't be myself. My followers would see through that, they're almost as savage as me. And you know the boardroom of Velocity Inc. believes my social media has attracted more revenue for them."

"Really?" Monet realised how sceptical she sounded until she saw her pained expression. 

"Look who needs to be kind now," Winnie sneered, growing frustrated with the doubt she received.

She checked the numbers and sales were up by 4%, it was partially because of her following, and she didn't gain any praise from her parents. And so she hoped, rather stupidly that she would get it from Monet and boy was she wrong.

"It's advice," Monet attempted to reach out to her but was rejected with haste.

"No, you just don't want me to be a bigger threat than I already am."

"You know that everything Julian does impacts me. Impacts others," Monet explained, narrowing her eyes.

"So you want to mould me. into your idea of who you think I should be. This isn't what we do," Winnie gritted.

"Haven't you heard of change, development or evolution?"

Winnie scoffed, "I'm not Julian. I'm not a project, I'm a person."

"Could've fooled me."

Winnie's face dropped and that's when Monet knew she made a mistake.

"See yourself out. I have a luncheon to get to. Big plans for my future and such."

"Winnie. Win," Monet called out but the girl was already out of view.

The Dubois heiress stormed towards her family's car, Caesar pulled open the door for her as she heard Monet leave the house seconds later.

Winnie slid in next to her mother. Luc was on the phone, opposite them as they began to drive away.

Margaux noted her daughter's aggrieved expression, "All that girl is cause you pain. Now look at you, frowning, since when did you frown?" Winnie remained quiet. "Winifred, I've allowed you to dither with those below us for far too long. Only very few families that derive old money that I recognise and the biotech empire isn't one of them."

"Then maybe you should," Winnie uttered.

"What was that?" Margaux hissed, satisfied when silence was all she heard. "This social media bullshit supposedly makes you happy, so I allow it. The board members believe it works for us. You it run on your own because I allow it. If you mess up I'll hand over all your socials to a media representative and let them handle it."

"You can't do that. My followers know me."

"The only person who knows you is me," Margaux hissed.

Luc continued chatting away on the phone, not getting involved in their squabble, even when a single tear trickled down their daughter's face.

"No one is entitled to know your true self, make sure you keep it that way. You are a Dubois, heiress of a fortune that billions would yearn for. I did not raise you –"

"-- You didn't raise me." You watched me.

Winnie's eyes flashed with panic when her mother's lips curled into a snarl.

"If I knew you were going to be ungrateful, I would've opted for a son, but you're here now. So listen. Leave your personal life at the door, your father is devising something big and you will not ruin this for us." Margaux awaited a response. "Winifred!"

Winnie flinched, "I won't ruin this for you."

"Good," Margaux plastered on an unnerving smile and turned away.

Winnie locked eyes with her father who she could see was no longer on the phone, yet continued holding it to his ear.

So she quietly scoffed and looked out the window, wiping another tear away and wishing she was in the comfort of her own room, but no, she was walking into the lion's den, which begged the question, would she have to sit back and take it...

Or bite first?

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a/n:

you've noticed by now how winnie's relationship to all the main characters differs. you could argue that she's only nice to max because of the "relationship" he has with ginny or because he's naturally charismatic and even winnie gets along with him just due to being classmates. her and audrey are another story. she dislikes her because audrey is julian's bestie. that's it. and the same reason extends to aki. however with aki, considering his father is as influential as someone like logan roy and is on friendly terms with her family, she doesn't do much to stir the plot. however, she does think very aki as a dull person. (his character was so dry in my opinion).

two legacies this chapter, milo and william and a brief mention of nate. i was debating whether i should include nate or not but he's too nice for winnie. i did name-drop an oc of mine that you won't see for a while (billy).

monet and winnie's relationship is odd as is it is turbulant. monet knows what to do to get ahead and julian is the biggest way in (according to the season 1 plot). she knows winnie is the biggest threat as is zoya but she's close to winnie and hopes to subdue her power and influence for her personal benefit. i hope that it's clear.

which interaction was your favourite? i'm partial to mummy issues so I'll go for margaux and winnie.